The Tales of Swaggy Joe

By Kg. Lyle

It all started in the 1970s when my own children were on the threshold of adulthood. The Roving Roo adventures were created around 1989 after a trip to the USA, where my daughter introduced me to a mascot named Kirby Kangaroo.

Swaggy Joe became the romantic character of my childhoodwhen itinerant workers still walked the roads. I have fond memories of some of them, notably an old timer of Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, named Brian Rice, who my Grandma Lyle employed in exchange for food and rudimentary accommodation in the back shed. Another was a chap named Ruben Webb, who my dad gave work to at our home. He worked well and then wandered his way. Great icons of honesty, integrity, and the freedom to live as they would were both of these men and others of their ilk.

I recognize that the normal way of life for me as a child has slipped by as prosperity and technology altered what my grandchildren know as their way of life. I felt that it could assist the new generations if they could be given some insights into life as it once was before their time, albeit in romantic tales of the imagination. For me to express this, I found the lyric ballad came naturally to be the utility of sharing. Although untrained as a writer and communicator, the urge to share a little of what was or maybe was prompted this little booklet.

I hope that the readers, those young and those not so, enjoy the unique sharing reading provides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Dec 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781503500259

Kg. Lyle

Kg. Lyle was raised in a country town in Victoria. He is the fifth generation of his family to have grown there, and now the seventh generation of the family continues in what is now a commuter abode for Melbourne. Kg. experienced the interdependent farming, secondary and tertiary society of rural towns as he grew from childhood to fifty years when circumstance called him to move. The valley of Bacchus Marsh, in those days, still held benefits for growing minds in a safe community. At age fifty, having exhausted his value to his family and community, he ventured forth into the very different culture of inner suburban culture Melbourne. He was fortunate to find sanctuary with people who exposed him to newer thoughts and understandings. He was introduced to the Usui System of Natural Healing called Reiki and became a practitioner of level 1 in 1992. His teaching master, Klaudia Hockhuth of Bungarie, elevated him through second degree before initiating him to master level shortly after. Kg. Lyle’s background was as the child of self-employed small business entrepreneur parents, who instilled community service as an ethos of responsibility to the society which supported them. He first started writing verse in the 1970s as he observed the growth of his town from its rural state into the urban reality of its present. Some of his work was printed in the local Express newspaper as commentary upon the local scene and administration at the time. Heritage has always been a stimulant to Kg.’s imagination as history is the base of the world we have now. Time moved on as it does, and with it, new people passed through the line of his life, each one gifting him with different aspects of living. Most of these gifts have stayed within him, even as the people travelled their personal paths, as he did his. Today he finds himself as a retired pensioner living with his lady of choice, Suzanna, in the beautiful region of East Gippsland, Victoria, with its natural charm of verdant bushland and gentle rivers, albeit challenging winter climate. It is in this tranquil paradise that Kg. has found the space to collate the journey of his writing. He hopes others enjoy the trip too.

Book preview

The Tales of

Swaggy Joe

Kg. Lyle

Copyright © 2015 by Kg. Lyle. 699037

ISBN:   Softcover   9781503500242

             EBook         9781503500259

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 12/22/2014

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Contents

Let’s Meet Swaggy Joe

The Story of Wombat Pyke.

The Surprise at Duckbill Creek.

The Jackaroo

The Land Spirit.

Young Jack.

The Character of a Man Revealed.

The Collectors

The Old Black Crows.

The Spirit of the Moonlight.

The News

The Adventures of a Roving Roo.

The Stories of Hopabout Kenny, the Australian Kangaroo.

The Flash Flood

The Fire at Blue Gum Flat.

The Robbery

Let’s Meet Swaggy Joe

Swaggie Joe was just relaxing in the shade of the old gum tree beside his camp at the waterhole. It had been a long day working as an itinerant day labourer on the farm just up the road a bit.

He’d mucked out the shearing shed, after the normal days’ work had finished on the farm and because it was daylight saving time, there was still plenty of warm sunlight left to relax and enjoy his cup of tea, or his afternoon cuppa-brew, as he called it.

Later he would strip off working clothes and have a refreshing dip in the waterhole to get rid of the smell from the shearing shed. But first was the cuppa brew and a quiet pipe of the aromatic tobacco he had enjoyed for years. He loved his old pipe. The smoke kept the flies and mosquitoes away, as well as other people, since smoking was bad for the health now a days, even if people breathed it second hand. It was different when Swaggie Joe was young. All tobacco did then was stunt yer growth, young fella, as his mum used to warn him. But times had changed and people knew more now, than they did then. These modern people could be right too, because often blokes died in their early fifties; some even in their forties; where as now; golly, people seemed to live on longer and be healthier than they used to. Anyhow, out there in the bush, on his own, at his own camp, he reckoned a pipe did him no real harm. He didn’t drink much, unlike some of the blokes who walked the roads looking for work.

He’d been a regular up and down this road and many others, for scores of years. He had watched many of the young people grow up, to take over the farms from their parents and start families of their own. He always stayed at the same camp site. In fact he almost had the feeling that it was his home. He had occupied the site so often, over so many years, he knew all the little tricks of the water hole beside it. He knew where to set a snare to catch a rabbit and when and how to catch yabbies or the occasional eel. He had lived on young bunnies often, when times were lean and there wasn’t much work or money about. The eels were a bit tricky because you had to keep them in clean water for a while to get rid of the muddy taste but even then, they could be very oily if not cooked just right. The yabbies, of course were a delicacy of the bush and he felt like a real prince when he could dine on a plate of freshly cooked yabby. On those days he often called at the local bakery for a fresh, crusty loaf of bread, then to the grocers for a slab of old crumbly mature cheddar cheese. A bottle of bitter ale, secured by a string in the waterhole to keep it cool, completed his royal repast.

He slept in the hollow base of