My Longest Round

By Gaele Sobott

’I’ve been fighting since the day I was born. No, I’ve been fighting from the time I was curled up inside my mother’s belly. The day my father shot himself in the head, that’s when my fight started’

Wally ’Wait-a-While’ Carr is an Australian and Commonwealth champion boxer who held twelve titles in six divisions. From featherweight to heavyweight, one of the last of the fifteen-rounders, he fought an astonishing 101 professional bouts in his fifteen-year boxing career.

Growing up in 1950s and ’60s rural New South Wales, it wasn’t until he moved to Sydney at the age of sixteen that he began to understand what racism was all about. My Longest Round is an Aboriginal man’s perspective on inner-city life; the two-up games, the gangsters, and the way working-class neighbourhoods looked out for each other. From hunting goannas, Jimmy Sharman’s boxing tents, rugby league, professional boxing and the first Aboriginal Tent Embassy, to present-day struggles and lifestyles, Wally’s story offers a vital snapshot of Aboriginal and Australian history.

Retiring from boxing in 1986, Wally faced a sudden void. The triumphs and glory, the thrill of the roaring crowds, the women and high life were replaced by loneliness and despair.

Wally’s inspiring story is also about his courage in overcoming alcoholism and drug addiction, of a great love for his children, pride in his Aboriginality and an incredible determination to survive and live with dignity.

’This is a raw, confronting account of one man’s struggle inside and outside the ring. Wally Carr pulls no punches!’ Roy Masters, Sydney Morning Herald

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReadOnTime BV
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781921791215

Book preview

My Longest Round

The life story of Wally Carr

Gaele Sobott

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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My Longest Round

Copyright © 2010 Gaele Sobott

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The information, views, opinions and visuals expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the publisher. The publisher disclaims any liabilities or responsibilities whatsoever for any damages, libel or liabilities arising directly or indirectly from the contents of this publication.

A copy of this publication can be found in the National Library of Australia.

ISBN: 9781921791215

Published by Book Pal

www.bookpal.com.au

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Sugarman

Met a false friend

On a lonely, dusty road

Lost my heart

When I found it

It had turned to dead, black coal

— Rodriguez, SugarMan, Cold Fact, 1970

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Foreword

This is a powerful biographical story about the journey of a young Wiradjuri boy escaping from the dreaded Aboriginal Welfare Board but haunted forever by his father’s death. It is a journey from the heartbreak and crushing loneliness of childhood to the mean streets of Sydney’s Redfern. My Longest Round illustrates both the tragedy and the humour of Aboriginal people. The tragedy is in having to face the circumstances described. The humour is part of the armoury of Aboriginal survival.

Wally Carr started off in boxing tents at country shows and then lured by the prospect of earning some extra money he became a fighter in Sydney. Amongst the boxing fraternity and in the gyms he found acceptance. With the hard slog of training he eventually saw the rewards, the championship titles, the recognition and the highlife with travel to exotic places, money, women, drink and new friends; many from the other side of the street. He rose high in the ranks of the Sweet Science winning the same titles as other great Aboriginal Australian fighters like Jerry Jerome, Ron Richards, Dave Sands and Tony Mundine. Wally stands proud among illustrious Aboriginal boxers like Lionel Rose, Hector Thompson, Lachie Austin and Steve Dennis and legendary Aboriginal champions like Elly Bennet, Jack Hassan, George Bracken and George Kapeen. Australian boxing history records no less that six Australian champions, all Aboriginal who each won three or more Australian titles in different weight divisions: Ron Richards, Dave Sands, Tony Mundine, Brian Roberts, Laurence Austin and Wally Carr.

Wally is to be inducted into the Australian Boxing Hall of Fame. Like others he will be recognized as one of the greatest fighters this country has ever seen. Wally Carr was a people’s champion, well celebrated, well liked, making life-long friends. Never forgetting where he came from, he was a champion fighter but never a rich one.

A good story captures the reader on the first page, usually in the first sentence or paragraph. Such is the case with My Longest Round. The content is captivating. There is an open raw truth that will connect the reader to the child and in time the man. I have the greatest pleasure in recommending the life story of Wally ‘Fox’ Carr ‘Waitawhile’.

— Lyall Munro Junior, Sydney, June 2010

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Contents

Foreword

How this book came to be written

Acknowledgments

One Where I Come From

Two From Pillar to Post

Three School Days

Four Odd Jobs

Five The Big Smoke

Six Getting into the Game

Seven Knocking About

Eight The Big Time

Nine Title Fighter

Ten Up and Down

Eleven The High Life

Twelve On the Skids

Epilogue The Gloves Are Off

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How this book came to be written

I met Wally through a mutual friend and the first thing he said to me was that he wanted to write a book about his life. He started telling me various anecdotes about his childhood. He talked fast and loud, and was crying as he spoke. He said he needed someone to write his life story for him. A week later I got back to him and said I would do the job.

My parents, my uncles and grandparents always encouraged me to look for, to listen to the untold story and to seek justice and dignity in telling that story. From a young age I have had an absolute passion for history, for oral stories, for written stories. I gobbled up fairytales from around the world, I devoured everything in the local library and the book mobile, I did the rounds of all Church denominations on Sunday mornings listening to the stories and gathering books. My father took me to see films like Raisin in the Sun. He gave me Gorky’s short stories, Tressel’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, Hardy’s Power Without Glory and a book which had a lasting effect on me called True Patriots All: a collection of broadside news articles from early colonial Australia. My father would take me to work with him where I loved listening to his workmates telling yarns during smoko. I listened to my mother talking to the shopkeeper or a neighbour, I greedily took in every detail on the rare occasions my uncles talked about the war, I listened to farmers talking about the drought. I got pleasure from listening and I kept on listening as I grew and travelled and lived in various countries, cultures, situations. I used what I had observed, what I had heard, and I wrote. In one way or another I have always lived the writing of my stories. So it was with Wally’s story.

I read archives, old newspapers and magazines but a lot of what is in this book comes from oral accounts. We travelled together to various places including Wellington, Warren, Narromine and Gulargambone to talk with Wally’s childhood friends and family members. We travelled to Brisbane, Melbourne and rural Victoria meeting people who were part of Wally’s life. The book has largely been made possible by the generosity of these people and their willingness to share their memories. The journey has been one of learning and healing. Wally says he has gained a new awareness of his past and let go of a lot of anger. For me the experience was not always easy. It was, though, a heart-opening, mind-blowing, rollercoaster ride in understanding humanity: Australian, Aboriginal, rural, working-class urban, boxing and sporting, male, and so much more of what it is that makes a community in this country. Far from being an academic pursuit, I have lived the writing of this book and it has been a life-changing event.

— Gaele Sobott 2010

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Acknowledgments

The research for this book was assisted by

the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, the

NSW Aboriginal Land Council and the Aboriginal Education Council NSW. We are truly grateful to these organisations.

Heartfelt thanks also to everyone who so generously gave their time and hospitality and dug deep into their memories to tell us their stories.

We would particularly like to thank:

Al Mander, Alex Flood, Allen Hedges, Anna Schinella, Arnold Thomas, Arthur and Elaine Stanley, Aunty Alice Wells, Aunty Claudia Carr (Mum), Aunty Doy and Uncle Henry Fox, Aunty Marge and Uncle Robert Freeman, Aunty Mooi McEwan, Aunty Shirley Fuller, Aunty Thelma Darcy, Aunty Thelma nee Carr, Aunty Toonkey Valda Baxter, Aunty Val Murray, Aunty Violet Carr, Barbara Bishop, Barbara Stanley and Greg Carney, Barry Michael, Billboy and Missy Carr, Billy Sparsis, Binky Rominski, Bob Kelly, Boyda Carr and Toni Smith, Brad Cooke, Bruce Bargallie, Bruce Sims, Charlie Crane, Claudia Carr, Coral and Guy McNeill, Dave Carroll, Dave Russell, David Bell, Doug Cleasby, Eric Honeysett, Frank Warner, Fred Wicks, Gloria Grey, Gordon Proud, James Wilson Miller, Jeff Malcolm, Jim Edens, John Backman, John McColl, John Saunders, Ken Hodges, Kevin Alchin, Larry Horne, Latif Rabhi, Leslie Fields, Lionel and Jenny Rose, Lorato Jaber, Lyall and Jenny Munro, Malcolm Bruce, Matt Ropis, Melissa Carr, Mr and Mrs Billy Muir, Mr and Mrs Bob Garling, Nigel Carr, Nudoo Carr, Parisa Asvadi, Paul Grechy, Paul Toweel, Peter and Leonie Darcy, Phil Lynch, Robert Hawkes, Robert Kelly, Ron Casey, Sharmilla Beezmohun, Shauntai Batzke, Steven and Keith Ryan, Teddy Beadman, Thara Mogwe, Uncle Bill Carr, Uncle Lance Carr, Uncle Ned Darcy.

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One

Where I Come From

I’ve been fighting since the day I was born. No, I’ve been fighting from the time I was curled up inside my mother’s belly. The day my father shot himself in the head, that’s when my fight started. That day was the thirteenth of June 1954. I was born two months later on the eleventh of August.

I feel like the 22 bullet that travelled through my father’s brain, just kept on going through my mother’s life and through my life causing injury and pain. That bullet lodged a whole lot of unanswered questions and unspoken words in my heart. I have been surrounded by silence. Silence means no one is talking to you. Silence means you are stopped from talking. Silence means no one is noticing or acknowledging you. In that silence I have always been lonely and hurting. I’ve always been an outsider. Now I want to spin a long yarn. I want to tell my story. I want to speak real loud into the silence and then it won’t be there anymore.

My father’s name is Wallace James Fox. When I was born, Mum registered me under her surname, Carr. I’m named Wallace after my father and my second names, William Edward, are from my mother’s father, old Coalie. Yeah, he was William Edward but people called him Coalie or Kingy Carr. Kingy because he was a king shearer, a gun shearer. They were using clippers in those days, not electric shears like now. I don’t know why he was called Coalie. He used to call me Folly Wox.

Old Coalie would sit out in the backyard drinking his smallies, telling jokes and yarning with his mates. He loved his drink and he was always sending someone down to put the bets on the horses for him with the SP bookie. He was a tall, snowy-headed man who was very gentle with us kids. My grandmother’s name was Thelma May Stewart. Everyone called her Growler because she was the one who kept the discipline in the home. She was really strict.

When we got into trouble Coalie would say, ‘Don’t worry about old Growler, come over here and sit with me. You’ll be all right.’ He’d give us little treats and whisper, ‘Don’t tell Growler.’

Growler was born in 1903 in Arthurville and Coalie was born in the late 1800s in Dubbo, New South Wales. She looked like Ma Kettle, a big woman about six foot tall. Her hair was done up real nice and neat. She wore these nice flower-print aprons around the house and was always well dressed whenever she went out anywhere. They were married in Tomingley in 1920 and had eleven children. There were five boys: Bill, Arthur, Bruce, Albert and Lance, and six girls: Marjorie, Enid, Linda, Violet, my Mum – Claudia, and Coral. Little Coral died in Dubbo from pneumonia when she was only about ten months old. My youngest sister, Coral, is named after her.

Coalie built a house out of kerosene tins next to the Macquarie River, down on the Common near where the mission is now. Western Stores used to dump their old four-gallon kerosene drums at the tip. Coalie opened those drums up and flattened them out to make tin sheets for the walls. The house had the boys’ bedrooms and girls’ bedrooms, Grandmother and Grandfather’s bedroom and a big dining room-kitchen. There was hessian across the ceiling and the floor was hard dirt, compacted and swept. Whitefellas used to throw out bits of lino and big carpet squares at the tip at the bottom of the mission. That’s how Granny Carr got a really lovely carpet in the dining room. Uncle Arty and Uncle Bill were working on the gold dredge on the river in front of the mission. Uncle Arty bought Growler this big, solid-wood, sideboard. You’d never get one like it today. She had that up one end of the room and a big dining room table in the middle. Then Uncle Arty bought her a stove. There was an open fireplace and that wood stove where Growler did the cooking. She’d do the cooking in the big camp oven that was outside too. Aunty Violet and Uncle Lance still talk about the big Christmas meals she’d cook up in the camp oven. My Mum was born in 1935 in that house. She was born on the Common. Old Aunty Julia Stewart was the midwife. She was a full blood. That’s Tucker’s granny. Tucker Stanley. Granny May and old Aunty Maggie Riley were midwives too.

There weren’t many full bloods around then. Old Harry Mudgee Phillips came down from the Diamantina River in Queensland. The Phillips were accepted into the community and that’s where they stayed until they died. Binga drowned in the river. They reckon poor Willy and Dicky Phillips died in the old Wellington Police Station. Whenever my Mum had to fill out any official paper in those days she had to write down that she was ‘quarter-caste’. It was the same for all her brothers and sisters. It’s a stupid description. I don’t know how you are meant to pick and choose what blackfellas are? You’re all black and you can’t change that. It’s simple, black is black. There’s no quarter-caste, no half-caste. They say the blackfellas are the quickest dying culture in the world. There were about four or five million blacks before the whites started landing their ships in Australia. There’d hardly be a million now.

Old Growler worked for some whitefellas called Harvey up the river at Apsley and she worked for the Willis family. She did their washing, ironing and general housework. She picked beans at the market gardens for a while too. She looked after her family and home so she must have been pretty busy. Uncle Bill, Uncle Lance, Aunty Violet and Mum all reckon they had a good life when they were growing up. My great grandfather, Coalie’s father, gave Mum and Aunty Violet some beautiful little bantam fowls that they looked after. Mum and Aunty Vi would set traps for rabbits just down from the house. At night they’d hear the squeals, take a kerosene lamp and bring the rabbits home for Growler to cook. Coalie liked fishing. He’d sit on the riverbank and dangle a line in. He knew where the fish were and would bring home cod, yellowbelly and catfish. The river was good then before whitefellas put the carp in and before they built the Burrendong Dam. Uncle Lance worked on that dam, building the walls.

The family did okay. They had a milking cow. Coalie would whistle and the cow would come walking up to him just like a dog. I don’t know if it wagged its tail or not. They had a horse called Skipper and a sulky. That’s how they travelled around: the adults sitting on the seats and the kids on the floor. They’d go to Peak Hill during the school holidays to visit Growler’s sister, Aunty Elsie. She was married to Jimmy Nolan. They’d leave Wellington early in the morning and stop at the little river, boil the billy, have dinner, spell the horses for a couple of hours, then drive on for about three-quarters of an hour to the springs. That was where there were heaps of goannas. When it was the right season for killing them, they’d get a couple of goannas, light a fire and cook them in the ashes. Goanna fat was good medicine for arthritis and good for rubbing into your hair and skin. They’d spend the night in the bottom paddock there and go on to Peak Hill the next morning. They always talk about the quandong fruit that grew along the Peak Hill road and the crayfish at Ten Mile Hole on the Wello side of Tommingley. They reckon you’ve never seen a waterhole with so much crayfish. They’d catch a rabbit, tie a bit of string on it, throw it in and when they pulled it up there were big blue crayfish stuck all over it. When they got to Peak Hill, they used to camp at the bottom end of Bulgandramine mission. Coalie used to shear out there some times for the cockies; the Canon family had a couple of properties. Uncle Albert, Uncle Brucey and Arty were all shearers. Uncle Billy was a shearer too for a while. Billy Lou they called him. He’s the best tap-dancer I’ve ever seen and he plays a mean mouth-organ.

Mum is two years younger than Aunty Violet so they knocked around together when they were young. They swam in the river nearly every day after school. Mum was a very good swimmer. She competed in events at the pool in Wellington and won lots of medals and ribbons. Mum reckons she always liked school. The primary school out there was one big room with all the ages mixed in together. The teacher lived in a little house near the school, on the side. The kids played the normal games: rounders, hopscotch, marbles and they skipped. One year all the country schools in the area came into Wellington for the annual sports carnival. The teacher was Miss Carrington then. She got the material for the kids’ sports uniforms and they sewed their own shorts and tops. It was the first time Aboriginal kids had gone in for the carnival and they took the cup home! Aunty Violet won a few ribbons that day. She was a good runner.

The first church at the top end of the Wellington Common was blown down. Every Sunday people from the Church of England in Wellington, Mr and Mrs Orange, or sometimes the bank manager or the dentist and his missus would go out and pick up Mum, Lorna, Nita, Violet and a few others and take them to church in town. They’d give them all tea at their home and then take them back to the mission. That wasn’t all that was happening on Sundays. In the morning a group of the older people at the mission used to play two-up out on the bridge near where Growler’s brother, Arthur, lived. Mrs Stanley was a great two-up player, played all the time. When they’d see the coppers, well poor old Mrs Stanley she’d run down the riverbank, take one dress off and come back in another dress.

The police would say, ‘Now where’s that woman with the pink dress on?’

She’d take the dress off and throw it in the river. She always had two or three dresses on.

The dredge bus would take men from town to the mission to work. Mum and Aunty Violet used to catch that bus back into town at about quarter past eight, get off at the fire station and walk to Wellington public high school. Uncle Lance rode his bike into school with Max Smith. They reckon there were no problems with black and white kids going to the same school then. There were some problems before that but not when they were going to school.

When Mum and Aunty Violet were old enough to leave school they got work on the market gardens down on the Bell River. A lot of blacks worked those gardens. They were owned by Chinese families: the brothers, Darcy and Billy Lousick, the Coons, Bos, Yuks, Normie Chok Ching, Billy Mowfun. They grew onions, potatoes, peas, beans, tomatoes and lettuces. There was always work of some description: picking, cutting, grading, bagging, stacking. Blackfellas were paid all right too. They watched and made sure they got the same as the whitefellas.

About that time when Mum was sixteen or seventeen, she started going to the pictures in town. There were two picture theatres then: the Mayfair and the Macquarie picture theatres. All the blacks used to go to the Mayfair Theatre. That’s where Uncle Billy first laid eyes on Elvis doing the jailhouse rock. They’d walk from the mission in to the Mayfair and back. It was a fair way. At night time too with the stories of wandungs, ghosts and devils and other