Pioneer Transport
“ … We lived on tinned dog and dried bread …”
From “The Northern Times” newspaper, 1991:
There is no doubt that the Afghan camel teamsters of West Australia were among the first to organise a commercial transport system between the inland sheep properties and the port of Carnarvon.
The slow, plodding camels and rumbling wagons hauled in the wool bales to the port for shipment to markets around the world. On return journeys, supplies and equipment were carried to the isolated properties and settlements, providing the only lifeline to those trying to develop the inland deserts as pastoral holdings.
Unfortunately, there is little documented history of the Afghan pioneers of the Gascoyne area.One of their mud-brick houses in William Street, known as “The White House,” was thoughtlessly bulldozed by the local Council some years ago.
The old house, believed to have stood for more than a century, is said to have contained a rear room set up as a makeshift mosque where the Afghan men prayed daily.
One Sunday afternoon, within half an hour, “The White House” was reduced to a pile of mud bricks and rubble – a part of Carnarvon’s heritage gone for ever.
In local memory, it is remembered, the Afghans traditionally camped in the East Carnarvon (Yankee Town) area, around Chinaman’s Pool, and on the still-vacant scrubland to the south-western edge of the East Carnarvon primary school. In this locality, the men with turbans and flowing robes ran a small shop, stocked with obsolete and unsold goods from the town’s central stores, their main customers being Aborigines.
As the Gascoyne’s camel teams were gradually replaced by the first motorised vehicles, Carnarvon’s Afghans, by now elderly men, decided to return to their homeland to die.
Without fanfare or any formal acknowledgement of their valuable contribution, the old camel teamsters left Carnarvon and vanished into obscurity. One of the few physical reminders of these pioneers is the remains of an old camel yard on Willian Street, close to the Chinaman’s Pool entrance.
In 1925 a Walter William Ammon – locally known as “Snowy” – applied for a driver’s job on the Hill Springs – Mardathuna run with a local trucking enterprise owned by Thornett and Bevan, carrying mail, wool and general freight. All the tracks were of sand of varying depths; steep sand dunes, river crossings, bogs, mechanical mishaps, punctures – all had to be coped with by the driver and his offsider. In treacherous patches one man cut scrub with an axe to lay a track for the vehicle to traverse.
“I cut scrub and more scrub,” W. Ammon wrote. “The scorching sand flew, and the radiator boiled and hissed like an over-pressurised steam engine, and the sun burnt holes through my back.”
Not many of the drivers stayed for a second trip. The endless sandhills, tropical rains and pitiless sun beat them, and the majority went south in search of easier jobs.
“We lived on tinned dog and dried bread,” W. Ammon recalled “… and we had the fellowship of the finest crowd of working people it has been my luck to meet.”
Camel Lane, now a quiet thoroughfare, “was the street where you loaded your truck with supplies before heading out to the stations. It was also the street to which you returned with your load of wool.
“Situated in it were the agent’s offices and their woolsheds. While I loaded my truck it was a bedlam of dust and sounds. Teams of camels drawing huge wagon loads of wool rolled around Dalgetty’s corner to the tune of cracking whips, swearing teamsters, and groaning, bubbling camels.”
Perhaps sensing their own end in the scheme of things, the camel teamsters bitterly resented the new-fangled trucks and their drivers. Camels cost the equivalent of $120 each, and there were 23 to a team. Add to this the price of a wagon, tarpaulins and other essential requipment, and the teamster could see at least $6,000 worth of business becoming obsolete overnight.
Damaged wagons were left to rot outside the blacksmith’s shop in Robinson Street, or abandoned in the riverbank scrub, while valuable camels were turned loose on The Common to become feral pests.
Carnarvon’s pioneer truckies were paid threepence a mile. They were paid nothing extra for loading and unloading, digging their way out of bogs, breaking their hearts in getting their vehicles over numerous sandhills, or for the sleepless nights and famished days. Their average track speed was five miles per hour, if lucky.
Eighty miles inland, having driven for 16 hours, the drivers “camped for the night on a claypan … We had a rug and a ground sheet, (using) our boots for a pillow.”
At the historic Mt. Sandiman homestead, the drivers met Bob Bird, a married man with six daughters, making the observation that Mr Bird “did not waste time … on stupid class distinction … cultivated by many squatters.”
In 1925, Mr Ammon ruefully noted, if their trucks broke down in the bush, “you worked out your own salvation” because it might be a week or more before anyone came along.”
Along the way he was often forced to drink the “oily mess” from the radiator, and “jam and butter were only memories.”
He remembers the incident where the well-known Scottish driver, Jimmy Campbell, on a normal station run via Cooralya, Boologoroo, Shaw’s Sand, etc., met his death by a lonely track.
With tyre trouble, Jimmy had apparently been travelling along, half hanging from the cabin to observe the tyre in action when he struck a stump – the steering wheel jerked out of control, and Jimmy fell on his head and broke his neck.
Before lapsing into oblivion, the injured man scratched out a depression in the sand as he tried in vain to move himself into a less painful position. For a long time, until the depression was filled with leaves and sand, the passing truck drivers often paused there to freshen their memories of a good mate.
Back in Carnarvon, between trips, the truck drivers went to the “picture house” to watch Buck Rogers and Mary Pickford, with rats scampering across the overhead beams – or patronising one of the pubs to “wash the red dust (from) their throats.”
Pranks were a popular form of entertainment, too.
George Freeman fashioned a piece of soap to resemble a stick of gelignite, and threw it, with spluttering fuse, into a crowded bar room, telling everyone he was going to blow the pub to Kingdom Come. “The customers nearly tore the doors from their hinges in their panic to get out,” Mr Ammon remembers.
Then there was the “Fighting Parson,” a Christian gentleman who roamed the roughest tracks in search of the Gascoyne’s most awkward souls. He was always armed with a spare pair of boxing gloves and a Bible. The parson gave the bushmen two chances: either attend his church service or put on the gloves for a sparring session. Most of the bushies chose to attend the church services; it was the easier of the two options, they said.
Another Carnarvon character was Bert Jones, a man with a very nasty temper. Driving around the local windy streets, Bert was constantly slamming on the brakes and running back to retrieve his hat as it bowled along before the prevailing breeze.
Finally, in desperation, he borrowed a carpenter’s tomahawk, rolled up his hat and angrily chopped it to pieces.
“It won’t blow off any other bugger’s head,” he growled, stalking off along Robinson Street.
As the grim depression years struck, Mr Ammon saw the Gascoyne’s roads filling with out-of-work swagmen.
One time he gave a ride to a couple of 17-year-olds. Seeing his rifle, they asked if he ever shot a kangaroo for tucker. The driver said he would shoot them a ‘roo if they desired.
Readily, the lads agreed. Soon afterwards. with a ‘roo shot and skinned. the truckie watched, amazed, as his famished passengers slashed off raw steaks and crammed them into their mouths, the still-warm blood dripping down their chins.
With tears in their eyes, the boys explained that they had eaten nothing for the past couple of days and could not restrain themselves. Out of compassion for their plight, the driver pulled over, lit a fire and grilled some more ‘roo meat for the hungry youngsters.
Sick of eating ‘roo steaks-chops-stews day in and out, at one time the Gascoyne drivers decided to patronise an old store that once stood beside the inland track, near Bidgiemia Station. A “middle-aged, scrawny redhead” asked the men to nominate their choice from the menu – goat or galah. Ordering a bit of goat, it was quickly served.
To disguise the smell and taste somewhat, the men asked the waitress if she had any pickles.
Poking her head into the kitchen, the woman yelled: “Hey, Mick, dig out that bottle of pickles, will you? There’s a bastard in here thinks it’s Christmas!”
Throughout the travels of Carnarvon’s pioneer truck drivers, they inevitably saw all the humour and tragedy of their rather harsh era: the station owner who threatened to shoot his terrified wife, a fencer who perished of thirst, “raw with sunburn”, his tongue protruding and terribly swollen,” desperate swaggies driven nearly insane with hunger, two bushies who shared a common wife between them, unknown men in lonely graves in places known by such names as Death Valley and Graveyard Flats.
As Mr Ammon said: “The country might well be proud of them, and proud, too, of the little band of pioneer truck drivers – my friends, who lived off their rifles, slept in the rain, and drove in the heat until they dropped.”
Mr W. “Snowy” Ammon passed away on December 7, 1991, aged 83 years.
COMMENTS
