Sundown Time
“…That’s a ghost kangaroo…”
Got the fire going?
At a meeting in a government department office, the chairperson noticed that a visitor was wearing a hearing aid.
At once the bureaucrat, well conditioned in matters of equality, decided to find out how all parties felt about the venue as a suitable meeting place.
She said: “This is rather a large room, and it sounds rather hollow, and some of us might not feel comfortable with the acoustical qualities. I mean, it is quite possible some of us would prefer to conduct this meeting in a much smaller room where everything can be heard more easily. Is there anyone who has a suggestion to make in this regard?”
All eyes turned around the room, curiously, but not a word was uttered.
The lady chairperson then turned directly to the hearing impaired visitor to enquire: “And how about you, Mr Smith, will you to able to hear okay?”
Mr Smith, cupping an ear in one hand, said: “Eh?”
Retired ringer, Big Mal, who nowadays hangs around the tourist cafes in the mall, was recently overheard discussing the snake bite victim, Jacob Klein, the young jackaroo from Orange Creek Station.
“Snakes these days aren’t as bad as they used to be when I was a young bloke,” he drawled to some American tourists.
“What do you mean they weren’t as bad?” came the response. “Do you mean in numbers?”
“Nah, in their poison,” said Mal. “I got bit once by a king brown, but it had to nip me three times before I got a headache out of it, and I cured myself with an aspro.”
The Americans looked him up and down, curiously, obviously not at all convinced of the big man’s integrity.
“I had a mate once down on Orange Creek and he reckoned he found an antidote for all snake bites. He noticed that when a goanna got bit, he always nibbled leaves from a certain bush, and it never died. So my mate said he was going to test out that bush the next time he got bit.”
“What happened?” the Americans asked. “Was he ever bitten?”
“Yes,” Mal nodded. “He got bit, and he chewed some leaves from the bush, but he died one hour later.”
“Oh? Of snake bite?”
“No,” Mal said. “He died from the leaves. They were poison.”
From T. Wilson (New South Wales):
You probably won’t believe me, but this is a true story – dinkum, mate.
Up along the Hume Highway, somewhere north of Melbourne, there’s a really steep hill known as Pretty Sally Hill. Before it was bitumenised, it was the terror of all truckies and others who had to climb up it because, apart from the loose dirt surface, there was a twist in it up near the top, so it made it very difficult to get any speed up.
When it was wet, which was nearly always, trucks used to get bogged everywhere and they were sometimes stuck there for a week or so, waiting for the ground to dry.
Anyway, I was driving up that road one dark August night in the middle of winter after some heave downpours. About halfway up Pretty Sally I could see in the headlights of my Mini Moke a long semi-trailer loaded with timber; it was stuck deeply in the mud to the axles, and the driver was stalking up and down cursing his luck, the truck, the rain, the government – and anything else that crossed his mind.
I braked the Moke ahead of him and walked back to see if I could be of any help.
“Ah, bugger it!” he exploded. “I’m supposed to deliver this load to a building site in Sydney tomorrow. Now I’ll never make it.”
“Don’t worry,” I told the truckie. “I’ll put you on a chain tied to your bumper and I might be able to pull you out of that bog.”
“Don’t be bloody silly,” he roared. “How could a silly little Moke pull me out of a bog.”
“i know it looks silly,” I said, “but just give it a chance, mate. That little Moke of mine is strong a ten elephants in top gear. It could bloody near climb a gumtree.”
Without much faith, the truckie assisted me in fixing a strong chain between the rear bumper bar of my Moke and the front bumper of his truck.
I told him to get in, start the engine and slip it into the lowest gear when the tow-chain tightened.
I started the Moke, revved her a bit, slipped it into first gear and slowly tightened the towing chain, moving forward inches at a time.
Then there was a thwunk as the chain took the heavy weight behind. Steadily, never pausing, I kep the Moke moving forwards and upwards, the wheels churning the mud to porridge as, ever so slowly but surely, the loaded semi-trailed sucked itself out of the much and very gradually gained traction and started climbing with me.
The little Moke never faltered. Slowly and steadily, it inched its way all the way up that slippery hill, negotiated the twist in the road without faltering and, with its engine bravely growling, we dragged that big truck to the top of Pretty Sally until it was safe to stop on flat ground.
Climbing down, the truckie was almost speechless with admiration and disbelief.
“Well, bugger me dead,” he growled. “If I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it was possible.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “It’s pretty amazing, eh?”
“But you knew you could do it,” the truckie said. “You were confident right from the start.”
“True, I agreed. “But I didn’t realise until I got to the top that I still had my hand brake on.”
Businessman, raconteur, and long-time Alice Springs resident, Reg Harris, has a fund of anecdotal stories from the colourful old days of
the Alice. Following are several samples …
In the early days of the Alice there was no crushed aggregate for use in concreting. A fellow called Johnny Ronberg was given a licence to mine Heavitree Gap.
Can you imagine trying to do that today? The conservationists would have your guts for garters.
Anyway, the quarry was on the south side of the MacDonnell Ranges – through the Gap, to the east, where the caravan park is now. Johnny would have cut another bloody gap if they had let him go.
Anyhow, the only person who objected to it was Leo Corbet, who owned Pitchi Richi. Would you believe it? The whole town was dirty on Leo because he was trying to stop Johnny from quarrying the Gap. Everyone in the Alice laughed at Leo, calling him a silly old bastard.
When Leo took out a mining lease to stop Johnny, the government came in to help Johnny and they gave him the land for a caravan park. That’s how Heavitree Gap caravan park became established. After the park was up and running, Johnny decided that his customers would like a bit of music. He put bloody great loudspeakers on several light poles and he played music through them for all hours of the night. The loudspeakers were directed straight at Leo’s place across the road.
Leo came to me one day and he said, “Can you get me the biggest and scratchiest loudspeaker you can find and I’ll play it back at Johnny. We’ll have a war of music.”
He brought up from the south a big amplifier and big speakers. He thought at first he would play God Save The Queen over and over until it drove him mad. But the worst possible thing he could think of was one of those boring old ABC radio plays. So he did that, and turned it up to full volume. It echoed all around the Ranges. It got so bad, he had to turn it off because it was irritating the hell out of him, too.
One afternoon some tourists from the caravan park came over to Pitchi Richi for a look around.
Leo said to them, “What did you think last night about that terrible noise?”
The visitors said, “Was that you?”
Leo said, “Yep.”
A tourist said, “You turned it off just when it was getting interesting.”
That stuffed up poor old Leo. After that, he pulled down the loudspeaker.
Jimmy Richards was a Sydney builder who came to Alice Springs to build the High School.
That’s the one near Anzac Hill.
When they were digging the foundations, they reckon they discovered a few spots of gold. Jim went straight into a panic. He thought some smart alec might come along and peg out a gold lease and stuff up the job.
So Jimmy pegged out the High School area and got it registered as a mining lease. After that, he continued with the building and finished it without interruptions.
Then Jimmy got the job of building the Flynn Church in the Mall.
He told us, “This is going to be my last job.”
He had two sons, you see, and he wanted them to carry on the business while he stepped aside.
When the church building was fairly close to completion, he went up one day on to a scaffolding above the front door to do something. He hadn’t locked the pipes in. He was on a plank laid on loose pipes. He leaned over and, of course, the plank slid away beneath him and he fell straight down on to the floor and killed himself. His ashes are now buried in that Pioneer Wall of the Flynn Church.
On the Stuart Highway, just north of the Alice, next to Beaurepaires, there’s a little rocky hill.
I was the chairman of the tourist promotion association one time and we got a message to say Dunlops were selling the hill to someone who wanted to build a service station.
We were put out by that. The last thing the town needed was another bloody service station. My comment at the time was, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it unless the Aborigines call it a sacred site.”
That got some publicity. Sure enough, some Aborigines came along and called it a sacred site.
One of them said, “Gee, I didn’t think Harris liked us very much but, by crikey, he did us a favour telling us about that sacred hill!”
The writer, Bill Harney, was a good mate of mine.
In those days I used to put on a couple of cartons for the blokes working for me every Friday night. So Bill used to come around every Friday night.
He’d sit down and say, “No worries, boys, there’s nothing wrong with the electrical work you did at my house in Chewings Street.”
Then, after about five minutes and a couple of beers, he would say, “Now one time when you’re going past, would one of you pop in and have a look at the power point in the kitchen – it’s not working properly.”
At one stage Bill was the only ranger at Ayers Rock. It was about the time when Bill Halley and The Comets came out with that song, Rock Around The Clock.
So Bill Harney was labelled as The Man Who Watched The Rock Around The Clock.
An old Territorian, Jack Hills, now retired at Port Augusta, offered the following reminiscences of his years working in the outback …
At one of the bush race meetings in the Northern Territory they used to put on an illegal two-up game on a Saturday night. A big crowd used to gather around, station people, Aborigines, policemen, everybody.
Everyone turned a blind eye to it, see? Two identities from the Tennant – hard cases, they were – decided to have a bit of fun. One was on one side of the table and one was on the other.
They started an argument, one accusing the other of cheating. It got pretty nasty, contradicting each other over money, that sort of thing.
After about an hour or so, it became really heated, and everyone knew there was going to be a ding-dong blue (fight). One of the blokes said to the other, ‘You’re a bloody cheat.’
The other one said, ‘Don’t you call me a cheat, you bastard, or I’ll shoot you.’
He dived his hand into a pocket and pulled out a pistol and went – bang! – and the other bloke staggered back and yelled out, ‘Oh, God, you’ve got me,’ with blood oozing through his fingers where he held his chest.
He fell on the ground, dead. Everyone was shocked at what had happened and they didn’t know what to do.
They were all saying, ‘Geez, he shot him,’ and they were running around in a terrific panic.
In the middle of it all, the dead bloke suddenly sat up and said, ‘That tricked yous.’
What had happened was this: the other bloke only shot him with a starter’s pistol, and the shot chap had one of those little containers filled with tomato sauce that they give you when you buy a pie.
He pulled the top off it and, as he grabbed at his chest, he squashed the red sauce and it ran through his fingers, looking just like blood. In the poor light, it looked fair dinkum.
There were some real scallywags around in those days. One fellow was out at a bush hotel, enjoying his drop of booze.
When he’d sunk down a few coldies, the publican tried to short change him.
It used to cost a shilling (10 cents) for a little glass, and he put five pounds ($10) down on the bar.
There was no refrigerator either. They just had a keg on the bar with a wet bag over it.
Anyway, this driver put down his five pounds and he only got the change of a pound ($2). A bit of an argument developed about whether it was five pounds or a pound.
After a while the truckie picked up his bit of change and walked outside, starting his old truck. He had a big tow rope, and he put it around the verandah posts on the pub, drove across the street, pulling the rope tight, then he went back into the bar and he said to the publican, ‘Now, was that five pounds I gave you, or was it one pound?’
So the publican quickly gave him the right change!
Back in the old days they were truck drivers and bushmen and that made all the difference. Some of them graduated from handling camel teams.
In those days you could leave your truck beside the road for six months. Unlocked, mind you. You could leave your wallet on the seat and no one would touch it. Not like nowadays.
When the blokes came in from the bush, they wouldn’t think of locking up their trucks. Everything was left open. Nobody would think of taking anything that didn’t belong to them. You’d no more think of doing something like that than walking down Todd Street with no pants on.
One of the early truck drivers one time had to take a load of furniture out to one of the stations. After being away for a week or so, he still hadn’t shown up at the homestead. So they went out to look for him.
A couple of hundred miles away, they came around a bend and saw a semi-trailer tipped up on its side. They first thought the driver had been killed. As they got closer and came around the other side of the truck, they saw that the driver had removed a lot of the gear from the truck.
He had an old kerosene fridge on board, so he stood it up and lit it and loaded it up with grog. He was lying back on a new sofa, pretty well sozzled with the amount of grog he’d drunk. They fired him on the spot.
Round the pubs there were plenty of characters, fellows like the old remittance man, The Count. Raymond Charles MacDonald was his real name.
The Count was supposed to come from a well-to-do family in England. He looked like he had a bit of Afghan or Anglo-Indian blood.
He was immaculately dressed, even though his clothes hadn’t seen any soap suds for three or four months. He wore a straw hat, and he had a walking cane, and got around like a real toff.
One time an old mate of mine came up behind The Count in the old Stuart Arms and pulled his straw hat down over his ears. The old Count turned around and, in his cultured voice, said, ‘Unhand me, you colonial lout.’
They were all plonk-ohs. Raymond was an expert at making Shellite cocktails. He used to hang around with the indigenous ladies. We called them ‘combos’ in those days.
One time they all got together in the scrub on the East Side for a bit of a binge. It must have gone on for about a week or so. One of them staggered up to the butcher shop and he said, ‘Eh, mate, can I have a shillings (10 cents) worth of dog meat, please, enough to feed six men?’
There was another funny bloke called Slim. He had a strange way of talking. His ‘hollow log’ was his dog, and he used to say, ‘Hit me in the fist with a fiddley-did,’ which meant, ‘Can you lend me a quid? ($2).’
Old Slim botted money off the station blokes. One fellow gave him ten bob ($1). Slim took one look at it and said, ‘I think I will take it to the Kodak shop and see if they can enlarge it.’
The first night when I stayed at the Stuart Arms pub I woke up early one morning hearing bang-bang-bang. It was a rifle going off. I walked along the river there and I came across a policeman strolling along with a rifle shooting fish in a pool.
I went up to this bloke and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m just shooting some fish for bait.’ That didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t push him.
We had some tough old policemen in those days. There was no vandalism. The old sergeant had the right idea. If you played up a bit, or he caught you drinking outside a pub, he’d just give you a boot in the backside.
One night he caught me and a couple of my mates camping along the river bank. He wanted to know what we were doing. We said, ‘We’re just having a cool drink, sergeant.’
He said, ‘Give us a smell.’
Of course, it was beer, you see? He tipped out all the bottles on the ground. He found some more that were unopened. He broke the tops off, spilled them on the ground, grabbed us, gave us a kick in the bum, and said, ‘Now get back in that dance hall. If I catch you drinking in the street again, I’ll give you a damn good hiding.’
That was it. No nonsense. No back chat. He kept law and order and everyone respected him, the bushmen’s way. There were no riots. He’d just come up quietly behind you and whisper in your ear and tell you that you were going the right way to get a box over the ears.
When I went up for my first driving licence, the sergeant said, ‘Drive around to the butcher’s shop. I want to get some meat.’ So I did that okay.
Then we went back to the police station to do an eye test. He said to me, ‘Geez, your eyes aren’t too good for a young bloke.’
I said, ‘No, they aren’t too good today. I had a late night.’
He said, ‘Oh, yes, what were you doing?’
I told him I had been hanging around the back rooms at the pub where the barmaids used to live, and I hadn’t got to bed until four o’clock in the morning.
The sergeant said, ‘So you’re one of the blokes who was keeping me awake all night with your noise, eh?’
So he gave me my licence.
Another couple of bushies drove into town from one of the stations to get a licence.
The sergeant said, ‘How did you get the truck in here?’
They said they’d driven it in, and the sergeant said, ‘Well, if you drove it, you must know how to drive,’ and he issued them with a licence. The young blokes had a few drinks to celebrate and finished up doing some wheelies in Wills Terrace and knocking over a couple of young trees, so they were arrested for drunken driving, taken to court and the licence was suspended. They didn’t even have it for one day!
One time an old bloke got a big stick and teased a big billy-goat to make him angry. The goat had big long horns like a bloomin’ scrubber bull.
The old chap opened the pub door and let the billy-goat loose. Well, he shot around, over the bar, just about scuttled everybody. That caused a bit of talk at the time.
There used to be another strange old character called Bill. He reckoned he was going to find oil here. He had a bit of a drilling rig over there on the East Side, but in the hills.
He got the hole down and went back to the Stuart Arms for a liquid lunch. He reckoned, ‘I’ll strike oil this afternoon.’
Some of the young blokes went out to his rig with some old sump oil and they tipped it down the bore hole. Old Bill came back after dinner, gave her a few charges, pulled up the bit, and there she was covered in oil.
He rushed back into town to the pub and was shouting drinks for everyone because he reckoned he was going to be a rich man.
Another old character was put on the Dog Act – you know, stopped from drinking grog by his wife. He came into the bar one afternoon and he said, ‘My old woman won’t let me drink. I’m going to blow this pub to bits.’
He got a piece of a broom handle, put a hole in one end and stuck a fuse in it. He had some fair dinkum gelignite paper wrapped around the wood.
He lit the fuse and chucked it into the pub. Everybody scattered. So the old fellow just sat there by himself and drank all the beers they’d left behind.
Yes, we had tourists in the old days, too. We used to reckon they’d arrive in the Alice with five pounds ($10) and a clean shirt, and the only thing they’d change is the shirt.
At one station where I used to shoot roos there was some old huts where we used to camp. All the Aboriginal blokes told us it was haunted. I had an Aboriginal bloke camping with me and he was a bit toey around there at night.
He’d never go out without a torch. One night I told him we were going to shoot on a particular piece of country, and he said, ‘Don’t go there, that’s a spooky place.”
But I reckoned we’d get some roos there, so away we went. We got down to an old out-camp and we had to go through a bit of a creek. It had been raining. It was a bit boggy.
I said to him, ‘You get out. I’m going to have to take a run through this. I’m going to reverse up the truck a bit. You stand back and make sure I don’t get out of the wheel tracks.’
Anyway, I got through the bit of a creek and roared up the other bank. The Aboriginal chap came running after me, and he went crook, saying, ‘You run through there and left me in the dark. You shouldn’t do that to a black fella.’
I thought it was nonsense. We drove on a bit further and came to an old camel yard, went past it and saw a couple of big boomers in the distance. They took off. We couldn’t find them. So we came back past the old camel yard.
There was a little doe in there. He said, ‘Don’t shoot that.’
I said, ‘Why not?’
He said, ‘That’s a ghost kangaroo. That wasn’t there when we went past. That’s only come up out of the ground.’
I said, ‘Don’t be bloody silly. It was probably hiding behind one of the big posts in the yard.’
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘that’s a ghost kangaroo. Don’t shoot that. If you shoot that, you’re going to be in big trouble.’
I thought damn it, I’m going to shoot it. It’s nice and fat. So I shot it. The Aboriginal chap wouldn’t get out of the motor car and hook it up. So I got out and hung it up.
We went around a bit further, past a dam, and we were going along when I saw another roo. I wheeled off the road to get a shot. Then I shot it, went forward, and I ran over a stick and it staked the front tyre.
I told my offsider to get the roo while I got a jack under the front wheel. While I was doing this, my mate came back and I said, ‘Hey, where’s the roo?’
He said, ‘It’s gone.’
I said, ‘I must have only clipped it and he might have got up and fell over again.’
The Aboriginal said, ‘No, the boys got him.’
I said, ‘What do you mean?’
He said, ‘They’re following us. You shot that ghost doe back there. I told you there was going to be trouble. First you staked the tyre. You shot that roo and now he’s gone.’
As we drove along I could see this bloke was agitated. He wouldn’t shine the light properly and he just wasn’t interested in shooting. I was a bit tired. So I said we’d go back home.
It was about one o’clock when we got back to the quarters. We had a bit of a feed and went to bed. The beds were out on the verandah.
I don’t know if I was awake, asleep or whatever, but I saw this ghost come up on to the verandah and get on my bed. It grabbed me by the throat and it was really choking me, and was crushing down on my chest at the same time.
I was yelling out and squawking and was making a hell of a noise.
The Aboriginal bloke said, ‘What’s wrong, mate?’
He turned on the light. I said, ‘That ghost had me by the throat. He was crushing hell out of me.’
That put him in a terrible panic. He sat up all night with the wireless going, the light on, and smoking cigarettes.
Years later, the station manager asked me if I had ever seen a ghost at the old hut. He told me the story of a swaggie who had heard the ghost walking up and down the shed in the middle of the day.
It was a fair dinkum ghost all right. It was half a man, just the top half. That was exactly the same thing I’d seen. I couldn’t say if the ghost I saw was a white or black man. It just looked like the top half of a human being.
One time at one of the stations up north we stopped on a flat to boil the billy and gut some roos. We saw some lights coming and thought it was the mail truck.. So we waited and waited.
It was a glow in the sky, down low. Fairly bright, too. We gutted the roos and had two cups of tea, but no truck come along. So we headed down towards the light. There were no signs of fresh vehicle tracks anywhere.
How do you explain that? This was the same area where some young blokes reckoned they were chased by something that looked like one of them flying saucers.
Another time I was driving along at night when I told my offsider, an Aboriginal bloke, that when we got to the next mill we would fill the billy at the water pipe and make ourselves a cup of tea. When we got to the gate where the mill was, he jumped out to open the gate and he started jumping around.
He said he had a stone in his boot and he couldn’t get the billy and fill it with water. So I got the damn billy myself and went and filled it up. We then drove down about 200 yards from the tank, but that wasn’t good enough. He wanted to drive further north where there was better wood.
We gutted the roos, and I said to my mate, ‘Why wouldn’t you go and fill that billy? You were only mucking around with that stone in your boot.’
The Aboriginal said, ‘There’s a ghost at that windmill. They had a young white bloke there years ago and he got that frightened by the ghost he climbed to the top of the mill tower and wouldn’t come down. Every time you go near that mill you get a cold feeling up your spine, and your hair stands up.’
I didn’t tell him that when I went to get that billy full of water that was exactly what happened to me. I kid you not. I went there and I stood on the thing around the tank to hold the billy under the outlet pipe. I had this funny feeling up my back, all prickly.
At another station out in the bush an Aboriginal bloke told me a story. They were travelling a mob of horses and they put them over- night in a station paddock and camped for the night in a station shed.
One of the blokes walked down to the end of the shed where they kept the empty hession bales. They make good swag covers on a cold night, you see? He had the bale over his shoulder and he started walking back to where his mates were settling down for the night.
Anyway, he stopped dead in his tracks because someone, or something, grabbed hold of the bag from behind and wouldn’t let go. At the same time he heard the iron roof start to creak as it does when the sun goes down and things start to cool off.
He thought it was a ghost who was chasing him because when he pulled it wouldn’t let go. He dropped the bale, let out a yell and him and all the other black fellows took off and started running..
They went down into the river bed about 300 yards away and camped there all night. What they didn’t know was that the bale had got hooked on a nail sticking out of a post, so it wasn’t a ghost at all.
On another station they used to have a telephone line going from the homestead all the way down to an out-camp, about a mile away, and the owner used to get in the office by himself with a bottle of whiskey, do a bit of paper work and write up his diary. Every now and then as he worked he’d give the old phone a tingle -you know, turn the handle and make it ring at the other end – and the Aborigines would jump up and answer the phone, saying, ‘Is that you, boss?’
But the boss wouldn’t answer. He’d keep this up nearly all night sometimes. At 7 o’clock in the morning, when the phone call usually came through, it rang as usual and the boss said, ‘Hello, boys. Everything okay?’
They said, ‘Did you ring us last night, boss?’
He said, ‘Nope.’
They said, ‘That’s funny. This phone bin tinkle-tinkle all night.’
Then the boss said, ‘Oh, that must be the ghost down there,’
The joke back-fired, though, because when they thought there was a ghost around none of them wanted to camp there any more.
An old Aboriginal chap told me the story of the first time he ever saw a motor car. He reckoned a mob of them blackfellas were down along the river trying to spear a kangaroo.
They were about to walk along the track when they saw two tracks going along, but no foot marks. They couldn’t work out how there could be tracks going along, but no horse or camel tracks in the middle.
He told me how they walked along those strange new tracks for a long way. They wouldn’t cross them. They thought it must have been a ghost pulling that car.
When they got up to the pub, they saw this funny looking thing there, no horse in it, no camel. The Aborigines walked around and around it, wondering what the hell it was. When he was taken for a ride, he reckoned he hung on for dear life and his hair was blowing out the back like a flag. Mind you, they were probably only doing about 20 m.p.h.
The same old fellow told me a story about the early days when the camel drivers pulled up to camp, the black fellas used to sneak in and pinch bags of flour off the waggon. So the old camel teamsters put a bag on the back that was loaded with sheep dip.
The really old Aboriginal blokes reckoned that back in the very early days they were often stuck out in the bush without any tucker, and they used to pick out the fattest bloke and kill him and eat him, even if he was a bit tough.
