Poynton Park

By Robert Peterson

The Australian natives and early settlement immigrants from England, Ireland, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Afghanistan surround Burke’s Billabong on the Flinders River in the Gulf of Carpentaria of Queensland, Australia. Their different cultures, religions, love and greed play out in the maturing second generation far from civilisation. Disease, dingoes, snakes and crocodiles are prevalent. Natives fight for their land and lives. The story, based on early settlement issues, follows RON POYNTON as he weaves through romance, family and neighbour deception.
The families begin running domestic animals and supplement a living from the tidal rivers where prized barramundi fish transport to city markets by small planes. Living outback is no easy street as the intruders steal grazing land away from the native animal population of kangaroos, wallabies and goannas. Native populations starve or shot for stealing domestic stock. They have no money to buy food, nor guns to fight back. Gold mining is not their way to prosper. Even the town folk begin to suffer as drugs become an issue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Peterson
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301712342

Robert Peterson

The Author grew up in North Queensland in the wettest town in Australia, as oldest of three boys after his elder sister suspiciously drowned in the Babinda Creek. He achieved an Associate Degree in Agriculture at Gatton Campus of Queensland University. Began serious writing on retirement after joining a local writing club and Writing.com. Accomplished writing awards at school and local shows, wrote agricultural extension and research articles, monthly farm memos and local newspapers over 20 years and collection of sensitive security metadata on a diamond mine. Humour arose as positive energy-challenging dimples of 30plus surgical operations over his life. The Author’s written work is Australian fiction reworked from numerous assumed bush homicides garnered while imbibing over a bar, around a campfire or out fishing on the Great Barrier Reef. The Author’s non-fiction life’s work competes as a Guinness Records tag for life’s stuff-ups, such as riding on a large crocodile, bitten by snakes, a giant eel, a stonefish, tiger sharks, gored and kicked by horses and cattle. The Author presently lives in Mandurah, Western Australia with his wife Glenys.

Book preview

Poynton Park

By

Robert Peterson

Smashwords edition

92,000 words

Published by

Robert Peterson on Smashwords

ISBN: 9781301712342

Poynton Park

Copyright@2016 Robert Peterson

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Regard most events as fiction based on actual outback tales, save for the natural beauty of an Australian bush. Images of fauna and cartoons spread throughout the book.

Table of Contents

Chapter... 1

Chapter... 2

Chapter... 3

Chapter... 4

Chapter... 5

Chapter... 6

Chapter... 7

Chapter... 8

Chapter... 9

Chapter...10

Chapter...11

Chapter...12

Chapter...13

Chapter...14

Chapter...15

Chapter...16

Chapter...17

Hardy Zebra finches roam most of Australia in families of a hundred or more.

Chapter 1

Australian soldiers stationed overseas in wartime seemed a strange assortment of jovial natures’ hell bent on a better life, and they spread the word of a lucky country. Migration after the First World War 1914 – 1918 to Australia increased significantly, due to dissatisfaction with circumstances in someone’s home country blown apart, discovery of precious metals, opals and the coming depression years.

Aussie shell-shocked soldiers, on leave from the front lines, did not mention the harsh conditions that migrants might expect during their conversations over drinks at parties. Australian native people already inhabited the country and they became hateful of white settlers taking up land for grazing and mining. The invasion of European livestock grazed food from a traditional diet the natives ate. England’s idea of a prison colony, soon gone awry, allowed free settlement to men and women who had experienced the worst of life and willing to settle by any means - after they did their time pleasing her majesty's service, and lived.

Hell yes, the migration prospered on rum, beer and other alcoholic formulas.

Procreation probably helped the cause. For instance, beer brewing only flourished when there were people to drink the stuff. Ah, those days of bottles clinking on ice, caps popping and the tilting of glasses filled with the brown frothy liquid were the best.

The imbibing locals became a profusion of laughter, bragging and bordellos… until the cussing, tempers and fighting broke out. The natives recorded those events as, 'White fellas all a time drunk, giddy-giddy and bum up’.

The power of a fist and gun, accentuated by greed and gleaned stealth from imprisonment, saw lands fought over in various ways. Money always talked, but the natives had none to barter. The indigenous tribes fought back when their fauna starved out of existence. They stole to survive or went hungry and perished. Mixed nationalities did not always fit in to the landscape and police presence became limited to only the major criminal activities - tribes shot out, or murder on a grand scale. Police troopers feared native ambush, oppressive heat and lack of beer halls out bush.

Four members of the Burke & Wills Expedition party in Robert O'Hara Burke, William John Wills, John King and Charley Grey eventually arrived on the banks of the Little Bynoe River, about 40 kilometres west by road from present-day Normanton on 8 February 1861 and established their most northerly Camp 119. Before they left Camp 119 Burke told King to blaze 15 of the trees around the campsite.

The party of four men, five camels and one horse, left Camp 119 on 13 February to walk back south 2,000 km to Coopers Creek to meet others of their expedition. They had used two-thirds of their rations in the two months reaching the Gulf and insufficient food for the journey back to the Coopers Creek depot.

Gray died and buried during the return journey. They abandoned or killed some camels and the horse and cut them up for food. Three men and two camels reached the Coopers Creek depot on 21 April to find it deserted. Burke and Wills both died from malnutrition at Coopers Creek leaving King as the sole survivor found by a search party on 15 September 1861.

Colonial governments despatched search parties for the missing Burke & Wills Expedition explorers as concern grew at the lack of news about the expedition. Five relief expeditions by competent explorers and bush savvy members discovered vast new areas of the inland regions. Their reports did much to initiate the extraordinary pastoral expansion of the 1860s and 1870s.

Frederick Walker's land party searching for signs of the expedition travelled from Rockhampton to meet the Victorian Navy ship HMCS Victoria in the Albert River. They found tracks of men and camels near the Flinders River on 25 November 1861 - his goal on the Gulf of Carpentaria. They had intercepted the tracks of two people wearing boots, two people in bare feet, and a horse on 6 January and north of Camp 119. This would have been tracks of Burke and Wills making their final attempt to reach the Gulf with the horse carrying supplies. The prints of bare feet were natives either following or accompanying the explorers. Later, on 8 January, Walker's party found Burke's Camp 119 with a tree marked B CXIX.

Leichhardt, another explorer, travelled through the Normanton area on his way from southern Queensland to Port Essington on Arnhem Land's north-west tip on his incredible 4800 km journey he completed in 1844-45. His trek took him inland north to the Atherton Tablelands across to the Mitchell River in the Gulf of Carpentaria then down toward the Nassau River about where natives speared ornithologist John Gilbert and left others badly injured. He crossed the Staaten River, staying close to the coast around the Gulf over the Boyne, Flinders, Leichhardt, on to the Roper River and up to north of Darwin while covered in boils, eating rancid meat, and totally exhausted.

In recent years, Aboriginal rock paintings purportedly of Leichhardt in both the Kakadu area and in Arnhem Land have become widely publicised. One shows a man wearing a tie and holding a rifle aloft like a spear. Lightning Man, the Creation Mother and other Dreaming figures occur beside and overlay emus, barramundi, thylacines, snakes, people and handprints. Some are superimposed with pictures of Macassan sailing boats, guns and men on horseback. The art portrays a potpourri of layered ochre-coloured stories not surprising if Leichhardt and his not-so-merry men were a part of these.

Leichhardt's group made it to the struggling Port Essington settlement of Victoria, established in 1838 as an English toehold on the continent's north on 17 December 1845. Although he hadn't found the optimum route for an overland track to Port Essington, pastoralists soon followed in his tracks, using his descriptions and maps to locate the best of the country.

Soon after, in April 1848, in the company of five white men, two Aboriginal guides, seven horses, 20 mules and 50 bullocks, he left the Darling Downs in southern Queensland bound for Western Australia's Swan River settlement. Shortly after, Leichhardt disappeared, aged 35. The entire party vanished with barely a trace.

The grandparents, Sir Highgate and Mary Poynton, came out from Kelso in Scotland. They were a stuffy sample of miscreants by middling standards. David, Earl of Tweeddale and Northampton, later to be David 1st, King of Scotland, brought over monks from Tiron in France to England. Some may have heard of Sir Walter Scott 1771 – 1632, a poet, playwright and novelist who came from Kelso; best known for Ivanhoe, Rob Roy and The Lady of the Lake. Sir Highgate ran part of the abbey in Floors Castle before migrating to Australia. The Crown accorded him a parcel of land in the hope he would spread the word of God. He tried his best, but monks did not fit in with heat, fever, pestilence and boomerangs.

Their son, Geoffrey, married Lisa, a beautiful English girl from Kent in England, in 1930. They spawned three healthy children: Frederick, Elsie and Ronald. Ron languished the youngster of the brood and folks often called him Young Ronnie, even now that he emerged at the pond grown up at twelve.

Mischievously, Ron’s father, Geoffrey, did a whoopsie and fornicated with an Aboriginal girl Cardinia who carried out house chores – actually most of the bloody chores. Ron since discovered her name meant dawn, guessing the reveille when dabbling daddy moseyed back home to bed. Incidentally, Cardinia produced a daughter that the family named Rosie.

Lisa said Rosie popped out of a drum of molasses and the stain would not rub off. Did she actually try? Rosie did cry a bit as a baby. Ron could align with another not integrating in the ménage.

The Poynton family raised Rosie after her mother’s relatives cudgelled Cardinia to death, speared her dad Geoffrey in his left leg while out riding and allowed him to bleed to death. There were other wounds but no one owned up to that and written in as his horse stomping on him. Rosie's tribal cousins did not want poor Rosie and whites spurned her, but Ron loved her dearly as a sister and a friend. Her caramel tan came natural, while Ronnie suffered pealed skin and painful interludes to grow a crusted-bread tan. Rosie elevated beauty when she smiled with glistening eyes and pearly teeth, though Ron could still beat her in a horse race.

Ron’s mother Lisa suffered out there alone as she blistered then calloused to toughen up, he knew, and hard for the children to accomplish the farm work now Geoffrey dreamed in Heaven. Fred did what he could not organise the littlies to accomplish.

That year was 1952 where the family lived in a place called Hell, or Poynton Park Station depending on the season. The family gathered most of their supplies shipped through Normanton, Queensland, in the Gulf of Carpentaria and they lugged it overland southwest to their property.

The beautiful homestead overlooked a water hole or billabong they called The Pond, or Burke’s Billabong to any visitors. This part of the river washed semi-tidal and part of the Flinders River system, massive in flood times and but a trickle in seasonal droughts. The Flinders snaked its way to the coast, breaking its course to include portions of the Boyne for part of its journey like viewing a plate of spaghetti on a map. Ron guessed folks could easily cross it at low tide, but sneaky crocodiles might eat them mid-stream. Those vicious brutes ate all the sheep that the natives did not spear and they fouled any fishnets the family put out for the prized barramundi.

Crocodiles became prized trophies as handbags and shoes in the land of the rich, but here they popped up like gophers, prairie dogs and meerkats to scare the hide off a kangaroo. They looked ugly whether alive or stuffed, stank as only a crocodile can while turning any water sports into a possible nightmare: regular toe-biters, lovers of puppy dogs and birdlife.

The Poynton farm lay beside several ungracious, sometimes innocuous neighbours who also jutted onto the Pond. A cranky couple of Irish descent across from the Poynton homestead lived with their burgeoning snotty-nosed brood on the western side of the tidal water. Maeve and Oscar O’Malley mostly kept to themselves. Their children, Aeden, Siobhan and Alroy were about the same age as those Poynton brats. They taught Ron to swear in a tainted brogue and constantly needed a bath. Ron only took a bath once a week by comparison, yet lately having his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.

Imagine bathing with sandsoap, mosquitoes and sand flies. Goosebumps!

The O’Malley farm name uttered something Ron could never pronounce, Guinness Grove, so he referred to it as that O’Malley place or called it the Bog Hole to tease the temper out of their children. Ron only did that when his brother Fred lazed about because the Irish could sure enliven their rage quick smart. They talked funny too with their mumbling accent all begorrah and eijit to Ron - Holy mother of God, you idiot. These Paddy Melons argued with the weather, the crows, and burnt tree trunks while their rum matured in a backyard still. A circus developed when Oscar sampled his brew, but surely no true Irish jig.

This seemed a great time to mention the other property. All the neighbours loved each other – on an occasional Sunday maybe, when the Lord said to rest by flooding the farms or inviting a soul to his den. These folk came from Rhodesia, but the names of those countries there changed more than the fickle weather. Stella and Johann Bredenkamp produced four little darlings: Jacques, Adanna, Myrtle and little Bethy.

Neighbours should not have such good-looking girls that swear as Ron’s departed dad did in a fit of raw temper. Ron loved teasing little Bethy because she appeared cute, even doll like and could not yet catch Ron when he ran off. Adanna was the best stone thrower he knew and she clouted Ron when he gave her the finger. She grew older and filled more than a passing dream in his head. Adanna sat on a horse looking a princess and the little sod knew it too: a queen to view, a gazelle in action and a toady warthog when she cussed.

If Ron had his own dog back then, well, a bitch, he would have named it Adanna and swore at it all day – in Shona, Ndebele and Zulu. That way his mother would not use a cake of soap to wash out his mouth. Ron remembered to collect bunches of flowers for his mother in case, but by the time he found blooms here about the devils oven his memory lapsed. There were flowers enough to create a scent of honey to keep bees busy. Ron would need a crane to take home a bunch of flowers if he carried a tall eucalypt or melaleuca tree over his shoulder. Several solanum shrubs flowered, one bright purple. The blooms withered on the way home to resemble confetti. Elsie, clever maiden, cut out crepe paper to fashion bright clownlike mimicry balanced in mother's finest vase.

An Afghan family lived up north away over the Poynton farm boundary. They worked hard clearing the bush to produce charcoal and corn to sell at Normanton after hauling it there on camels’ backs. The family prayed to some other God. Citizens stayed right away from their farm. The girls covered themselves in cloth anyway, so Ron could not say if they were pretty or not.

Youssof and Zohra Housseini and their children Santaz and Zemar sure worked relentlessly as they grew a funny crop that they chewed and smoked. Ron looked it up in a book because they could not spell it for him. It sounded ma-wah-na and old Youssof sometimes called it ganja. Ron tried it once, fell giddy off his horse and grew the hugest headache for hours. He did not see why they would smoke such shit, tasting bitter, similar to lettuce and rocket fed on pig dung, but it sure turned his moods. The girls seemed inviting when he smoked it and made him brave, braver anyway if he could lose that awful cough. Ron troubled growing hair in stupid places like a fluffed mother hen to activate his intrepid spunk.

There it was then, four farming families of differing nationalities and customs, who did not always see eye to eye with each other unless there came a famine or a flood.

One must be honest and say there were a few times when a member of one family became friends with another across the crocodile infested lagoon. No, not the children – none that Ron knew of - the trigger were those bloody adults.

Why they could not stay in their own back paddock and cook up decent meals made him weep. This was a dinkum harsh country, requiring the stockmen to be away from the main homestead gathering cattle or planting crops in the valleys. Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and those Boer religions should have a permanent fence between them to still the occasional dalliance. Bringing families together meant trading expletives and blows where explanations fell insensitive.

The indigenous people, who originally controlled the land about, learned to keep their chocolate bodies hidden, until they killed domestic stock through hunger. Their religion and customs sat way out on a limb on the tree of life. They rode no horses to skedaddle upon, or guns to protect themselves from the white intruders. Spears, boomerangs and nulla-nullas/cudgels were still deadly weapons when a native surprised intruders out from behind a tree.

Stella Bredenkamp took a shine to Oscar’s ogling, the blarney stone over in the Irish camp. Cocky little man was Oscar O’Malley and he should not have done the business with Misses B, even if her name resembled breeding, after she sprouted four stupid kids already.

Old man Johann took the stock whip to his missus and cut her up something shocking. Ron nearly puked at the blood and skin missing from her rump steaks – those large ones and all. Lisa Poynton took her in for a week or two before she ran off with a fishmonger named Westy Verdanigher, yet another nationality infusion.

Westy near slit old Bredenkamp’s ribs in two and folks reckoned Mister B never recovered from it. That entire affair morsel enjoyed a peachy side to life. Freddy and Elsie, plus Ron of course, learnt a valuable lesson. If they wanted to do the bull and cow bit, then they had better find a lonely gully somewhere. Fred said Ron would grow a squeaky voice if someone caught him at it.

Girls were not much at branding, cleaning fish or fencing anyway, with all their moaning at the heat and flies plus continually hitching their laced knickers.

What Ron stated before remained true. The sheilas over the water were humdingers to perve at and now that the adults sulked or had disappeared, the kids needed to get together at harvest and mustering to survive. The odd cow duffer came a butchering and miners were always snooping around.

The nomadic natives were forever asking for tucker - what they called yuul or kaikai. They had many words for things, when they wanted it. A shotgun blast over their heads did the trick, until they speared the cattle. The .303 Enfield rifle came out then and they sure could scatter with lead zipping around their bums. Old Poynton poisoned a carcase with strychnine right away if he saw them hacking it up. The farmers did not need their guns then… until the next tribe arrived. No wonder they hated passionate poisoning pop Poynton, big brother Fred and took their anger out on the family.

Brother Frederick evolved a mean son of a bastard, too. He decided, without telling Ron first, to wink something cunning at Adanna, leaving Myrtle the Turtle and little Bag of Bones Bethy for Ron. Fred said Ron had a choice of two and he should be grateful. Ron sure fell for that Adanna’s golden hair and those blossoming boobs. She could swear a bit though, now her old man coughed up stuff from that skewering from Westy.

Old Bredenkamp never gave Ron the time of day before and he threatened to shoot Ron if he wandered over the fence. Yet, after his argument with Westy’s knife, he could not acquire enough help with their firewood and branding. Lack of muscle allowed Ron near the girls though and he considered shooting his smartarse show-off brother Fred, but only in his dreams mind.

Ron needed Fred on the other end of the crosscut saw. Ron figured to wait until Adanna grew sick of Fred’s stupid jokes and saw the real worth in himself. Ron grew muscles in his arms from hard work and he saw her admiring them. Adanna teased a roving eye that one and a wicked wink.

When Frederick went out mustering, Ron used a weight with pulleys to crosscut the trees on his own for firewood and fencing. He pulled the saw through the cut until the weight pulled his saw back the other way. When Fred helped him, Ron leaned on the saw when his brother pulled, so Fred buggered up and they had to rest. He figured if Fred was the biggest, then he should cut the most. Nothing came fair about brothers' petulant antics when the lasses came around.

Ron always admired a cowhide print stretched over a timber frame at the Irish residence that Oscar named Guinness Grove, but Ron preferred Bog Hole. Well it was true. They kept no garden or lawn because the pigs rooted it around as a baker's mixer gone eccentric.

Their mood rattled Ron each time he visited there because he sensed different emotions. That saucy Siobhan sure smelt better every day that he visited. Ron called her Shaboom to make her thrust her enticing chest out in defiance. Maybe Freddy could have Adanna after all. Ron wished Oscar saw a speck of good in himself though. He kept sharpening that filleting knife when Ron came around. The thought of becoming a steer made his goolies twitch, toes shudder and glutes contract.

Sober Oscar became an intolerant fellow, though enlightening to watch butcher a hog and cut it up into useful meats such as garlic sausage, smokehouse bacon and pickled pork - all done in a morning, unless he wandered to his still products. He ranted on in his Gaelic or Irish or Paddy musings. Ron laughed and scampered at Oscar's slobbering drivel pronouncing his pork sausage as ispini muiceoil; laugh aloud. Oscar broke three pencils attempting to write it down before giving in when he stuck his left ear fending off a blowfly. The infused bleeding went to sausage and smoke.

Over behind the Bog Hole sat a hillside with reddish rocks they said held bauxite. Native bodies wrapped inside paperbark, lay upon branches raised off the ground and sacred to the Aboriginal nomads. The Poynton and O’Malley kids all stayed away from the place. If farmers wanted the natives to leave them alone, Ron thought, then fair enough to reciprocate good intentions. Ron met a young coffee-hued fellow called Hutch or thereabouts who asked him in jabba-jabba dialect and ground scribble to tell the others to keep away. He convinced Ron he would not spear any cattle if they did.

Oscar caught him a month later eating a speared calf. Ron guessed he became hungry. Hutch was soon inside a pond crocodile where ranting Oscar flung him.

Siobhan would have to wait for Ron until her old man died of the drink or snakebite, he reckoned. That man sure could get his dander up. Imagine what might happen if a mosquito bit him on his bum. Ron figured he could shoot the mug when his time came. Somewhere out in the mulga might do, and no one would venture near the site if he placed him on a raised trellis covered in brush and bark. Oscar already stank from sampling juice from his still and becoming quite mummified as if eating garlic pork ballooned to apple-in-his-mouth obese.

No schooling happened out at the Pond at that time. The only school about would take the children a week to arrive there and a week coming home. Mum Lisa taught Frederick. He taught Elsie, who laboured teaching Ron, who must have been a slow learner dropped at birth and slow to recover - according to Fred. Anyone could count lollies when they had to share, or they missed out when cunning Fred wanted to present more to Adanna. Older brothers needed a smack in the chops for doing that, but Ron expected to develop more before he sought to handle that big bludger.

A government appointed teacher came around for a week, about four times a year. He acted a bit rough around the chops, according to Mum Lisa, sounding the way folk from the city chortled on radio. He went off the deep end when anyone did not listen or do as he asked. The gang of pond kids gave him hell. Authorities should send a beautiful woman teacher with some compassion for boys resembling Ron maybe? He preferred the correspondence classes they took because with the floods and isolation, Lisa only went to town sporadically for the mail and supplies at the Burns Philp shop in Normanton.

Poyntons kept two cattle dogs that Elsie named Bitsa and Foss. They both were pedigreed and no mongrels for the Brits, Fred said. Ron laughed when Fred kept referring to them as bastards. Bitsa wore black and blue patches, hence the dopey name given by Elsie. Foss happened to be the second stupidest name.

Those dogs must have hated humans for their given moniker, the way they barked and snarled at arrivals. Elsie named Foss after a Charles Calveley Foss (1885-1953) whom authorites awarded a Victoria Cross for bravery, so Ron guessed that was something. The dogs went with him everywhere but the waterhole. They chewed up snakes and goannas, but hated those sneaky crocs for a reason. Ron would rather they hopped in the water first, so the croc ate them.

News in from a drover man was that the visiting teacher dynamo would definitely not be back. The children all cheered until Lisa told them off. He chimed into a fight about his teaching methods with neighbours down the road toward Burketown. Belligerent folks that lot, expounding on what they did not understand as perfect English for the bush. When their fisticuffs flew, he evidently dived into the river to escape the belting and he went down for the count. Neptune's soup kitchen might have wished a hungry crocodile, a swordfish cut him, a river shark or chalk-swallowing grouper winning that bout. Anyway, Ron dreamed to see a cute blonde-haired woman with the right moves yet, before he grew out of school days at 14 to curb his attention deficiencies.

Ron nearly lost one of his friends that way last summer. He heard later that Myrtle B, the snapping turtle tyke, went fishing and waded into the water to muscle in a barramundi. Old Bredenkamp reckoned she stepped on a poisonous fish. He called it a stonefish, though why they called it that Ron did not honestly know. He never saw a rock look so flamin' fugly.

Animatedly as a piglet's castration lament, she screamed and hopped around so much Ron rowed over to see what the trouble might be. He never let a happening go by to gather experience up there in the scrub. Mister B called Ron a nosy bastard and said he should piss off. Education came in different ways.

Myrtle screamed for hours to fight consciousness several times. Valium did nothing. Folks did not have spare ice in the bush in those days. Hot water did zero, except made her wail more and ripen peeled-banana style skin off the wound. Her foot swelled up to double as she hopped around for a month before her sensation came back. She fished from a boat after that or stayed away from the water. She could still kick with the other foot when her personality