Swampy: Tall Tales and True From Boyhood and Beyond

By Bill Marsh

Charming, funny autobiographical stories from one of Australia's best-loved authors of Australiana.
For me, Beckom was one vast playground. From the plover-infested homestead to its dam crawling with yabbies; along the meandering mysteries of the Mirrool Creek; up to the forgotten pine forest; over to the dusty silos of harvest; this was my backyard. I could leave home at sunrise and return ragged at sunset, my heart overflowing with a day of games and adventures. What more does a kid need? In this collection of stories, Bill 'Swampy' Marsh takes us from his childhood in a small outback town in the 1950s and coming of age at an all-boys bush boarding school, to his journey as an adult, when he revisits and reflects on youth by travelling in his father's footsteps through rural Australia.Loveable and eccentric characters are brought to life with humour and affection as we are led through mateship and manhood, cricket and footy, young love and heartbreak, battlers and larrikins, courage and loyalty.these are tales of everyday life in rural Australia. the simple things. the important things ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780730499022

Bill Marsh

Bill ‘Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. Based in Adelaide, he is best known for his successful Great Australian series of books published with ABC Books: More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), Great Australian Droving Stories (2003), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001), and Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999).

Book preview

PART ONE

Beckom (Pop. 64)

In which I arrive in a small bush town during the 1950s … and survive to tell the tale.

Beckom (Pop. 64)

I GREW UP in a small town in the south-west of New South Wales, about 240 miles from Sydney and 270 miles from Melbourne. It was Dad’s first managerial posting in the bank. I was just a kid. The township sits inconspicuously in the golden wheat belt; its name — Beckom (pop. 64).

Fifteen miles to the east is Ariah Park, which produced Ricky Quade, the Australian Rules football champion, who became the first coach of the mighty Sydney Swans.

A further twenty miles eastward is Temora, the largest town in the area, and home of Pale Face Addios, the trotting legend.

To the west, five miles, is Ardlethan, famous for its scattered tin deposits. A further fifteen miles on lies Barellan, the birthplace of Evonne Cawley (née Goolagong).

So you can see, I grew up in the vicinity of some good company. But we rarely visited those surrounding towns. We were too secure within our own community.

For me, Temora held the smell of decayed teeth being drilled. Or the coughing up of blood from withunder an ethered hangover after my tonsils had been dragged from my body.

Ariah Park was vicious fights behind the football dressing shed, where it always seemed they had more in their team than we in ours.

Ardlethan was a town mucked about by the economic possibilities and probabilities of tin mining. And Barellan was just a toilet stop on the way to Griffith, relative-visiting.

No, we only ventured out when it was necessary. Sixty-four people were enough to try to get along with in this world, let alone any of the millions who lived beyond our tight boundary.

The pub is the focal point and oldest building in the town; a mammoth double-storey place which has enough rooms to accommodate all of us in case of some emergency or other. Its brick and boarded walls saw a steady stream of publicans over the years fall to loneliness and/or alcohol, until Freddy Thomas turned drinking into a business.

The silos dwarf the whole township; five cylindrical concrete monoliths reaching into the heavens, whose tops have been covered in cloud on the odd occasion. It was always my childhood ambition to throw a stone right over their tops. I know of no one who has accomplished this feat.

The bank is the town’s most stately building. Made from proper stone and solid brick, it looks out of place set amongst the other scattered tin, fibro and weatherboard dwellings. It was built when a planner from the city thought Beckom was the place of the great tin strike. Building had been completed by the time the planner arrived to discover that the tin strike happened down the road a bit, at Ardlethan.

We never really had that much time for planners, because Beckom was successfully designed more by mother nature herself than by mankind. The frequent dust storms and occasional floods changed street directions and property boundaries at will. You can actually witness your backyard being turned into the main street as the earth is picked up and dumped elsewhere by the strange phenomena of those wild winds or raging waters.

We learned to live quite comfortably with nature’s plan. So you can imagine our apprehension when trucks and graders pulled up outside the pub one day and asked Freddy where he wanted the tarred main street to be laid. Ten blokes spent weeks working on that 200-yard black bit of road. It was the closest thing to a tourist boom to have happened in Beckom. It became a local attraction to come and look at the strangers building the main street. Bets were laid on how long it would last. A week after they finished the job, the 1950 floods came and washed away all their hard work.

But then the strangers returned with their trucks and graders and fancy ideas, to re-tar that which had been washed away. They are very determined people, because now they come every two or three years and build us a brand new bituminised main street. Freddy thinks that perhaps they like his beer.

The 1956 floods are the main reason Beckom can boast two cemeteries. I remember peering over an insecure levy bank and watching Barney Johnson, recently deceased and buried, float nonchalantly by. To this day I swear he waved at me as he passed. The new cemetery is now well away from the unpredictable Mirrool Creek. Barney Johnson became its first inhabitant. He slept in the pub’s coldroom for a week, waiting for the flood waters to recede, before being moved to his second and more permanent resting site.

Beckom’s oldest living resident, Doctor Granger, helped build the pub in 1908. He liked the place so much that he stayed on after building’s completion and set up surgery in one of its rooms. It seems unlikely Doctor Granger is a fair dinkum doctor, but he’s somehow managed to successfully deliver a good many of us and rarely do we get sick. So, he’s gained our faith, which, in most cases, is more important than modern medicine anyway.

The Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages would show that a Mrs Jan Whitcombe of Beckom was the oldest person to have lived in Australia. That is actually wrong because Doctor Granger knew nothing of death certificates at the time of her passing. After she was supposed to have reached 100 years old we began collecting the annual telegrams from the Queen. They were proudly displayed on the pub’s notice board until she reached 125. When a newspaper sent a crew all the way from Sydney to interview her about the secret of longevity, Doctor Granger had to make up the story that Mrs Whitcombe regretfully had died the very day before the newspaper crew arrived, apparently from injuries sustained while chasing wild rabbits on foot.

There are five of us in my family: Dad, Mum, two elder sisters and myself. Both my sisters had already left home, strong in the belief that a move to Beckom would have nothing to offer them culturally. The elder of the two found a husband down a coal pit near Newcastle, the other found hers somewhere amongst the smokestacks of Sydney. I knew they must’ve had other things on their minds because, even at my young age, I realised it’d take something more important than culture to make someone move away to the cities.

For me, Beckom was one vast playground. From the plover-infested homestead to its dam crawling with yabbies; along the meandering mysteries of the Mirrool Creek; up to the forgotten pine forest; over to the dusty silos of harvest; this was my backyard. I could leave home at sunrise and return ragged at sunset, my heart overflowing with a day of games and adventures.

What more does a kid need?

Arrival

IT HADN’T SEEMED like we’d been living down on the south coast of New South Wales that long when a letter came out of the blue telling Dad that he’d been promoted. Apparently he was to take up the position of bank manager in a place called Beckom. Mum was over the moon. She’d harboured great aspirations for Dad. Finally the astrological charts had turned in her husband’s direction. Dad was on his way to the top.

There was just one thing that stood in our way: nobody seemed to know where Beckom actually was.

Fortunately the letter came with a map of New South Wales and there, way out in the south-western back blocks, an ink pen had made a cross. Etched beside the cross was scribbled the word Beckom.

My eldest sister, Barb, had already left the family nest, which left me and my second eldest sister, Marg. But on seeing the map, Marg let out with, ‘I’m not going. I’d die out in a place like that before I found a husband.’ She was nine years older than me and had just started her first job — she had her own life to lead, her own income, and was determined that wild horses couldn’t have dragged her away. Mum reluctantly organised somewhere for her to board, and there she stayed until she met a ‘city slicker’ and disappeared off into the big smoke of Sydney.

One early mid-November morning, after Grace Bros removalists had taken off with our worldly belongings, all was set. We shed a few tears with Marg and the few friends who’d come to see us off, and we headed out of town in our old FJ Holden. Dad was as pleased as punch with the car but, for me, there were warning signs. When we first went to fill it up with petrol, the bloke at the garage took one look at it and said, ‘Mate, it’s a bomb. It’s got a fucked radiator and it needs a new set of rings.’ Dad just brushed the comment off with a quick, ‘She’ll be right,’ and we drove out of that garage in a cloud of smoke.

But things had already started to go wrong by the time we reached the Blue Mountains. The garage man had been spot on about the fucked radiator and the need for a new set of rings; steam hissed out the front and black smoke belched out of the back as we tried to get the FJ up the steep, zigzagging incline of the treacherous Bulli Pass. Still, Dad wasn’t going to be defeated and we somehow inched our way higher and higher until we made it to the summit. If I’d hoped the descent was going to be quicker than our ascent, I was wrong. Dad certainly wasn’t taking any chances, and we edged our way down the western side of the Great Dividing Range at about the same speed we’d gone up the eastern side.

We finally picked up pace once we’d come down off the mountains and started out across the plains. Even though steam was still hissing out of the radiator and smoke was still billowing out of the exhaust, we made it to a place called Braidwood, then headed straight on to our national capital of Canberra. That’s when Dad hit his first ever roundabout — the thing was almost as big as a cricket oval. There was a garden area in its centre and around it was a circular road with three lanes of traffic. Branching out from the roundabout were about five or six exits, heading in all directions — one of them presumably in the direction of Beckom.

Dad somehow managed to get the car onto the inside lane of the roundabout but, not used to negotiating his way through city traffic, he got stuck there and we kept going around and around. After about our fifth revolution, Dad had a brainwave. He called it his ‘slingshot theory’, likening it to how David had killed Goliath: if he got the car to gather momentum each time we went around the roundabout, when we reached maximum velocity and he saw a break in the traffic that coincided with the exit, he’d plant his foot and we’d be flung out of the roundabout like a stone from a slingshot.

So that’s what we did, and upon each revolution of the roundabout the old FJ gathered momentum. By our sixth revolution Dad saw a break in the traffic. He planted it, and we rocketed out like we’d been through a ringer and spat out the other side. Out that exit we went, our mood on the rise. A straight road ahead of us. Tension released. Dad’d succeeded. His astrological streak of luck was still running hot. Then after about five minutes Mum said, ‘Bert, I’m sure we saw some of those houses on our way into Canberra.’

Dad had taken the wrong exit. We were heading back along the road to Braidwood, so he turned the car around and went back for a second go at his slingshot theory. This time things worked better and it only took us five jet-propelled revolutions before we’d gained enough velocity to be catapulted through the traffic and out the exit. Only trouble was, this time we ended up on the road to Sydney — the opposite direction to which we were supposed to be going.

Dad’d had enough. So he came up with a ‘wait and see’ theory. What he did, instead of having to face another misguided slingshot exit, was simply drive up onto the central garden area in the middle of the roundabout, and wait there until the traffic died down before giving it another go.

This was his best idea yet. We’d been stuck on the road for so long we’d completely missed lunch. Mum got the thermos and the stack of curried egg sandwiches she’d bought along for the trip and we settled in for a bite to eat. That’s when the police arrived and asked Dad to explain why he was parked in the middle of the garden area, in the middle of the roundabout. Which he did. But for some reason the police didn’t seem too convinced about Dad’s slingshot theory. Nor were they too keen on his wait-and-see approach, so they kindly offered to show us the way out of Canberra. Problem was, even they didn’t know which exit would take us to Beckom. So Dad laid out the map on the bonnet of the car.

‘It’s there,’ he said, pointing to the cross marked on the map.

That settled, the police stopped the traffic and we followed them off the garden area, across the roundabout and out an exit. After a cautionary word about how the old FJ needed a new set of rings, the police sent us on our way. But it’d already been a long day, so Dad decided it was best we stay in Canberra overnight and then set out at the crack of dawn, on the last leg of the journey to Beckom.

Someone had told Dad that it’d take us no more than a day and a half to get to Beckom. But as we headed out of Temora on the third day of our travels, I harboured grave doubts. The old FJ had just about given up the ghost — and so had I. I developed a theory of my own: this was all a big hoax and some prankster — most probably a Russian spy agent — had it in for Dad. We’d been sent on a wild-goose chase. There was no such place as Beckom. It never even existed. We’d end up in the middle of nowhere and die, just as Marg had predicted. What made things worse was the heat. With each mile we crawled onward, the heat rose in degrees. It was hotter than anything I’d ever experienced. The inside of the car was like an oven. Outside it was like Hades. We wound down the car windows to try and get some breeze, but it didn’t help at all. Still we plugged on. Then, just as we were about to tackle a long drawn-out hill, leading us further into eternity, Mum shouted, ‘Bert!’ and there, beside the road, was a half-fallen down post. Dangling from the post was a white-ant riddled sign, reading BECKOM 6.

Only six miles to go. Even the car seemed to perk up a bit as we started on that final haul toward our destination. Half an hour later we made it to the brow of the hill, and there it was: a massive set of cylindrical silos, with not more than a dozen houses scattered around it.

‘Oh my God, Bert,’ Mum gasped. ‘Is that it?’

We’d arrived.

The Promise

I SAT ON HIS KNEE.

‘And what would you like for Christmas this year?’ Santa asked.

The touch of the flowing beard; that secure feeling of being close to someone who could make your every wish come true.

Taking the crumpled list from my pocket, I began to read: ‘I would like for Christmas, Santa please, a new cricket set, ’cos Buster the pup ate my last one; a book about Don Bradman, please; a guitar, please; marbles, please … you know, the big cat’s-eye goolie ones …’

I’d cried with fear the first time I was presented to Santa. He looked like no other. A stranger, from far, far away where it’s white with snow and bitterly cold all the time.

‘Have you been a good boy this year?’

I drew a deep breath, looked at the floor and whispered, ‘Yes.’

Santa exploded into laughter.

‘Are you sure? I thought I heard something about you not being nice to little Bewler Saunders. And fighting at school. And not doing your homework.’

Either Santa had a damn good network of spies around, or he’d been briefed by someone before this encounter. But who? My suspicions rose. I desperately needed the new cricket set, so I decided a more honest approach might get me out of trouble.

‘I admit making some mistakes, Santa, but it wasn’t all my fault. I really try to be good but it’s just … just … so hard sometimes.’

I looked pleadingly into Santa’s eyes. They seemed strangely known to me.

‘Then you’ll just have to try harder in future, won’t you?’

‘Yes, Santa. And thank you for coming all the way to Beckom just to see us kids.’ Sweet as pie.

I clambered down from Santa’s knee, knowing my case hadn’t gone as well as expected. If I was lucky, perhaps I might still get the cricket set.

I felt somewhat dejected, even betrayed.

Walking home that hot afternoon, something kept eating at my mind. Santa’s eyes, his rosy cheeks, the muffled laugh, and that particular tobacco smell … all so oddly familiar.

It hit me like a thunderbolt in the middle of the night. Santa Claus and Danzy Burt were one and the same person! No wonder he knew all about my teasing Bewler Saunders, the fights, my hate of homework.

That morning I raced over to Danzy Burt’s place and found him at the milking bails, contentedly puffing his pipe, his hands caressing milk from teat to pail.

I confronted him. ‘You were dressed up as Santa Claus yesterday, weren’t you, Danzy?’

Danzy’s head fell at my accusation. So, my suspicion had been correct. Danzy had masqueraded as Santa.

Then he turned from the cow, looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘If you promise not to tell a living soul, Swampy, I’ll tell you the whole truth.’

So I took up Danzy’s promise and sat listening with ears and eyes wide open as I was told the ‘whole truth’ about Santa Claus.

Danzy explained how Santa had been delayed from leaving Sydney on his way to Beckom by a freak storm. Then, just outside of Yass, his sled was smashed after being run off the road by a speeding truck. By the time he reached Harden, Prancer and Dancer were suffering from dehydration and were left behind. Then at Stockinbingal, Rudolph damaged a fetlock and almost had to be put down. Santa was forced to leave the rest of the reindeers at Springdale and continue by foot. When he reached Temora he was suffering so bad from heat stroke he collapsed in the main street.

Santa had rung Danzy from the Temora Hospital, saying how sorry he was not to be able to get to Beckom this year and find out what the children wanted for Christmas.

It was then that Danzy came up with the idea to dress up as Santa, find out what all us kids wanted, and let Santa know before it was too late for Christmas.

So the truth was out. But only Danzy, me and Santa knew.

I rushed home and sent a ‘get well’ card to Santa care of the Temora Base Hospital. On the back of the card I mentioned that I knew all about Danzy, and reminded Santa about the cricket set I wanted, just in case the list Danzy sent got lost, or something.

To this day I’ve kept that promise I made — and never told a living soul about that one time Danzy Burt got dressed up and pretended to be Santa Claus.

My cricket set was the envy of the school.

Barney

Barney’s gone to heaven,

away up in the sky,

where he plays amongst the raindrops

and the clouds that pass him by.

Dad wobbled home from the pub late one night with Barney. Dad’d bought him off a travelling salesman who was down on his luck. Barney had cost five bob. But Dad was like that with money.

Mum and I dug around and found a big round glass vase. We filled it with water, tossed in a few stones, then in went Barney, into his new home.

I was given the responsibility to look after Barney, which I did with relish … for a couple of days. Then it dawned upon me that a goldfish must surely be the most boring sort of pet anyone would want to own.

Barney would just swim around and around and around that glass vase, day in and day out. Never a smile for those in the outside world who might’ve been prepared to give him a little love. And the only reason he wagged his tail was to keep his fat orange body in fluid motion.

He wouldn’t fetch any of the matchsticks I threw in to him. He wouldn’t roll over. He wouldn’t shake hands. He just swam … around and around.

Brownie, McCaughney and me went over to Temora one day on a school trip and saw a man and a lady who had lots of animals doing tricks. There were mice turning little Ferris wheels, dogs using walking sticks, seals balancing beach balls, galahs singing songs.

The man told me that he used to own a big fish once, which he taught to jump through hoops that were on fire, dance backwards on top of the water, and even spring up from out of the depths to pluck a sardine from his fingers.

I held a sardine over Barney’s bowl for so long, I almost hypnotised myself … Barney didn’t even take a look at it, just went around and around.

I picked Barney up and tried to teach him how to dance across the water backwards … but he didn’t have a clue. He wasn’t even the slightest bit interested in making friends with the tadpoles I showered him with.

No doubt, Dad’d been sold a dud fish. I had to agree with Mum, Barney was nothing but a waste of money.

One night, in desperation, I told Dad that I’d taught Barney to do magic … how to fly in the dark! But Dad wouldn’t believe me. Even when he found Barney swimming around in the glass with his false teeth the following morning, he still didn’t believe me.

I told McCaughney about all the trouble I was having, trying to teach Barney to do tricks.

Now that was a mistake, because McCaughney got a bit carried away at times. Before long, McCaughney had Barney outside near the wood heap. He took him out of his bowl and rested him on the end of a ruler. The aim of the trick was to flick Barney up into the sky, getting him to complete as many somersaults as possible before he landed back in his bowl. McCaughney said that the world record of twenty somersaults was held by a Peruvian trapeze fish.

After two tries, Barney was looking pretty sick. His record stood at fifteen somersaults, though McCaughney was having trouble getting him to land back in his glass vase.

On the third throw, McCaughney gave it his all. Barney took off into the sky, spinning like a top. Above the garage roof, up through the peppercorn tree. I held out the bowl to try to help soften the landing.

But Barney didn’t return to earth.

McCaughney and me peered through the peppercorn tree, up into the deep blue sky above. We saw no spinning goldfish — didn’t hear him land anywhere. We climbed onto the garage roof and searched. We scaled the peppercorn tree and searched. But, alas, no sign of Barney.

Bitterly ashamed of our deed, we confessed to Mum. It was obvious she wasn’t too keen on Barney; she didn’t even belt us.

‘He’s probably gone to heaven,’ she said with a shrug and continued the washing.

McCaughney and I went outside, looked up through the peppercorn tree and out into the vast sky. We hoped that by the time we got to heaven, Barney would’ve found the heart to forgive us.

The Ghost Who Walks

BROWNIE, MCCAUGHNEY AND ME sat huddled by campfire’s edge, clinging to an old woollen blanket. The icy winds of July crackled the embers. On the other side of the flickering fire, sat Brownie’s dad, telling us of his childhood days when life was much harder, things much different. And of how the township of Beckom had grown out of the dirt. The struggles … the trials … the ghost at the silos …

‘Ghost? What ghost?’ us boys called in chorus. ‘We haven’t heard about any ghost!’

‘Tell us about the ghost! Oh, please … come on, please,’ we begged.

With our attentions clinging to Brownie’s dad through the licks of fire, he began … ‘Back in the early summer of 1920–21, the rush was on to complete the building of the silos for harvest.

‘I’d been eagerly watching the silos’ progress and checked their daily growth by throwing a stone over the top each afternoon after school. As the weeks moved on, this task naturally became harder and harder, with the silos growing in height. Eventually it was an impossibility, but I kept on with my stone throwing ritual, more as a habit than anything else, really. Then, with harvest in sight, the builders began welding a catwalk along the very tops of the silos.

‘One afternoon as I picked up a stone to throw, I caught a glimpse of a lone welder waving at me frantically from out on the end of the silos. Then, to my horror, he started running back along the catwalk as if he were being chased. I saw him stumble and fall. A terrible scream echoed out from within the empty silo walls. Then a thud, as the body hit the ground.

‘I ran to the pub for help. When I returned with some men the welder was barely alive. His body lay shattered and twitching. His tongue hung from his jarred, open mouth; his face turning green and his eyes cracked open in a fearful stare.

‘Those eyes, they seemed to latch onto just me, following my every move. No matter where I went, they found me … and stared. I became so frightened in the end that I had to go outside to escape their glare.

‘When they brought the welder out on the stretcher, those eyes caught me again. Then he struggled to lift himself and, pointing in my direction, said, It was you, boy … It was after … you!

‘He stiffened into death. The blood congealed in his mouth. But his eyes stayed set upon me.

‘I couldn’t sleep properly for months after the accident, tossing and turning … raging nightmares with those glassy eyes staring at me, holding me. And the question remained unanswered of who it was that the welder said was after me … and why?

‘So I told my story to a couple of mates of mine, Tommy Tiddle and Jack Jones. Now Tom figured himself to be a bit of a one with the supernatural. He reckoned that if, upon a full moon, we returned to the place where the welder had fallen, all would be revealed and the evil spirits would be freed from my body.

‘The following full moon we set out. The elongated shadows of the foreboding silos stretched like tentacles, beckoning us toward them. Owls hooted into the stillness of the night.

‘Under the arches of the dumping bay, the wild wind moaned its welcome, blowing the wheat dust up about us, stinging our eyes. The entry door to the silos had been left mysteriously ajar. We forced its hinges and entered into the deep, dank darkness. The first harvest in the new silos had come and gone so the silos were now empty. All the wheat had been railed off to distant cities. The hungry mice scampered and bit at our feet. The distant flutter of the bats high above echoed a warning. As quiet as possible we moved over to the pulley lift for our ascent into the unknown. Undoing the safety chain, we entered.

‘Klink … klink. The sound of chain links over the pulley as it began to rise.

‘Klink … klink. The air getting heavier and heavier with the foul smell of bats and mice.

‘The occasional darting ray of moonlight blinded our eyes as they struggled to adjust to our foreign surrounds.

‘Klink … klink. Higher and higher, the blood draining to our fingers and toes. We struggled for breath, afraid even to whisper, our ears searching for any odd haunting sound.

‘KLANG! We crashed into the docking bay, hundreds of feet above the ground. Undoing the safety chain, we slipped out onto the catwalk and began crawling. Nothing but emptiness below. Deathly silence now all around us.

‘Inch by inch we edged out toward the scene of the tragic accident. Tom led the way, I followed, then came Jack. By the time we reached our destination our bodies were completely drained. We sat … waiting.

‘Then the strangest of things started to happen. I began shaking all over … ever so gently at first … then more. I turned to Tom, then Jack. They were shaking as well. The whole catwalk shook, like there was an earth tremor! We held on as tight as we could, the catwalk groaning on its hinges. The bats sprang to life, flying uncontrollably about, bashing into us.

‘Then a wind started blowing up from below … and with it came a howling noise, bouncing off the empty silo walls.

‘We began to clamber back toward the safety of the pulley lift, the howling building up around us. Tom froze in fright as a thick, black, stinking mass oozed itself out from the howling.

‘Move, Tom. Move! I shouted.

‘The black mass lifted Tom clean off the catwalk. I reached out to grasp his outstretched hand. He touched at my fingers. Then he disappeared down into the darkness below. His scream faded into the dark … then a soft slap as his young body hit the bottom of the empty silo floor.

‘Silence returned … dead and ugly.

‘Jack and I made another move toward the lift. With only twenty feet to go, the catwalk began shaking again. The bats took to wing, the wind rose … then returned the howling, oozing out its black mass.

‘All we could do was to hold on for dear life, as the catwalk was ripped from its moorings, flinging us about as if we were tied to the end of a rope, bashing us against the silo walls.

‘Then a jagged shaft of light exploded through the roof, spearing into Jack’s body and nailing him to the catwalk. He gave forth one last blood-curdling cry and died before my very eyes, writhing in agony.

‘The silence ebbed back.

‘My last chance … I scampered frantically over Jack’s still-pulsating body toward the lift. The howling black mass returned with a vengeance. The safety chain flung wildly, like a whip gone mad … thrashing at the air, holding me at bay. I felt myself being lifted and propelled back to the edge of the silo wall.

‘With all my strength, I pushed against the black mass, the chain slashing at my face and hands. I grabbed hold of it and locked my grip.

‘Then a crack. The chain snapped. I was flung over the edge. Falling, I tried gripping at the concrete wall, my fingers being ripped to the bone. I saw something dangling in the darkness. It was a leg. With one last, desperate lunge I grabbed onto the leg and pulled hard.’

Brownie’s dad got up, stretched, and said, ‘Okay now boys, time to turn in.’

Brownie, McCaughney and me remained in aghast horror. Brownie’s dad had left the story unfinished. Hanging halfway down the silo wall. An abyss below, the howling, black, stinking mass above.

‘But whose leg were you pulling on?’ we asked with bated breath.

Brownie’s dad just smiled at us.

Arch Rivals

KAMARAH-MOOMBOOLDOOL ARE RENOWNED cheats, bullies and dirty players. Just ask anyone who’s had the misfortune to play against them.

The day of the bowls match, held at Kamarah, was to be no exception.

I could see that things weren’t going too well on the bowling green. Dad was looking agitated. Danzy Burt gnawed angrily on his beloved pipe. BBQ Bob (Brownie’s old man) was mumbling under his breath and Bluey Saunders was having a few words with the Kamarah-Moombooldool skipper after one of Dad’s bowls had mysteriously been moved away from next to the jack.

It was one of those spring days when the scent of gum and wattle hung in the air. So, with nothing better to do, Brownie, McCaughney and me went for a bit of a wander to fill in time.

We were down by the oval throwing stones at the dressing shed when something poked out from around the corner and shouted, ‘Beckom kids smell!’

We were a bit taken aback by this. Not so much at the abusive words, but more in wonder if the words were spoken by an animal or a human being.

‘Beckom kids stink!’

Brownie said it looked exactly like his pet ferret, Fang. McCaughney thought it human.

‘Beckom kids pong!’

It was human all right, but one of the oddest-looking sorts we’d ever seen. We pelted some stones at this human ferret to flush it from its lair.

‘Beckom kids are all sheilas!’

It scurried across the oval. We caught the ferret near the cricket pitch, gave him a black eye, blood nose and sent him home bawling his eyes out.

Bored, we drifted back to the tin shed they called the Kamarah-Moombooldool Bowling Club to get a drink.

The mood on the bowling green hadn’t improved. Words were now being freely exchanged. A little pushing and shoving had entered into that normally genteel game.

We went and sat in the back of Bluey’s brand spanking new Ford ute to finish our drinks.

‘Beckom kids are all sheilas!’

The ferret had returned.

‘Beckom kids are …’

He darted back around the side of the club house, we in hot pursuit, right into their neatly laid ambush.

‘Youse Beckom kids been pickin’ on our little bruvver, Tommy.’

Surrounded by the ferret and his four oversized ape-like brothers, escape was out of the question. The biggest brother took a swipe at Brownie. I laid the boot into his shin.