Don’t talk to me about Pecos Bill and Colorado Jack and that giant of the lumber camps who picked his teeth with the trunk of a spruce! The heroes of American folk tales are sissies compared to the men of Australia’s mythical station, the Speewah. Why, Crooked Mick of the Speewah, a man who would sooner have a fight than a feed, used Ayers Rock to stone the crows and he was no giant by the Speewah standards.
No, give me the Australian folk heroes every time. Tales of them have been told from Cape York to the Otways, from Brisbane to Broome. Where teamsters met or drovers gathered, tales of the Speewah were handed on and men pushing their way outback claimed they had reached its boundaries and there were some who said they had worked there.
‘When I worked on the Speewah . . .’
‘Talk about mud! You should have been on the Speewah . . .’
‘Call this a drought! Why, on the Speewah . . .’
Yes, Old-timer, strange things happened on the Speewah. The kangaroos there were as tall as mountains and the emus laid eggs that men blew and used for houses. But where the Speewah is, no one knows. The men from the Darling said it was back o’ Bourke and the men of Bourke said it was out West and the men of the West pointed to Queensland and in Queensland they told you the Speewah was in the Kimberleys.
Tom Ronan, a bushman of Katherine, N.T., told me in a letter:
‘It was, I think, originally, the place a bit “farther out”, “over the next range” where cattle were a bit wilder, horses a bit rougher and men a bit smarter than they were anywhere else. With the growth of blackblocks folklore, its position in the scheme of things became more definite: It was the land of running creeks and shady trees and good, green horse feed, the bushman’s “Field of Asphodel”, the place where all good bagmen—and some weren’t so good—went when they died.
‘In the early years of this century an old drover named Jim Dillon settled down on a bit of country out sou’-west from Wyndham, W.A., and called it the Speewah and it still appears on the map as such, thus giving rise to some argument as to whether it was not the original Speewah from which all outlandish places and events took their origin.’
Whatever its origin, it is possible, from the stories told about it, to get a picture of this mythical station and of some of the men who ran it. The hundreds of stories told about the Speewah are fairly consistent when it comes to giving an idea of its size and though many men feature in the tales one or two crop up regularly, giving the impression that they were ‘permanents’ known to all the ‘casuals’ who came out with yarns about them.
Firstly, there is ‘Crooked Mick’ who tried to strangle himself with his own beard in the Big Drought. He was a gun shearer; five hundred a day was nothing to him. Once, the boss, annoyed because of Crooked Mick’s rough handling of some wethers, strode up to him on the board and barked, ‘You’re fired.’ Crooked Mick was shearing flat out at the time. He was going so fast that he shore fifteen sheep before he could straighten up and hang his shears on the hook.
His later days were saddened by a serious accident. He was washing sheep when he slipped and fell into a tank of boiling water. Big Bill, who was standing beside him, whipped him out, tore off his clothes then seized two wethers and cut their throats. He ripped the hides off the wethers and wrapped them, flesh side in, round Crooked Mick’s body and legs. When they got him to a doctor three weeks later the doctor took one look at him then said, ‘Boys, you’ve made a wonderful job of him. It would take a major operation to remove these skins. They’re grafted to him.’
According to Big Bill they took Crooked Mick back to the Speewah and shore him every year after that.
‘He made twenty-two pounds of wool,’ Bill said. ‘Not bad.’
Big Bill, who built the barbed wire fence, was the strongest man on the Speewah, they say. He made his fortune on the Croydon goldfields cutting up mining shafts and selling them for post holes. He was originally put on to fence the Speewah but gave it up after a day digging post holes. He left his lunch at the first hole when he started in the morning, then at midday he put down his crowbar and set off to walk back for his lunch. He had sunk so many holes he didn’t reach his lunch till midnight. That finished him.
‘A bloke’d starve going at that rate,’ he said.
Then there was Uncle Harry who rode the crowbar through Wagga without giving it a sore back. He was a modest man who had carted five tons of tin whistles through country that was practically unknown at the time. Once, when Big Bill was boasting about his strength, someone asked Uncle Harry had he ever done any heavy lifting.
‘No,’ he said modestly, ‘I can’t claim that I’m a strong man. Weight lifting was never in my line. However, I once carried a very awkward load off the barge towed by the Tolarno. It was near the Tintinnalogy shed and, mind you, I’m not claiming this load was heavy, only that it was very awkward. I carried, and the banks were steep, too, a double-furrow plough, a set of harrows and eight loose melons. As I say, it wasn’t the weight, only the awkwardness of it that makes it worth telling.’
Slab-face Joe was the bullocky on the Speewah. He drove a team so long he had a telephone fitted on the leaders with a line going back to the polers. When he wanted to pull up he rang through to the black boy he paid to ride the lead, and told him to stop the leaders. Half an hour afterwards Slab-face would stop the polers. Once when he rang through he got the wrong number and wasted a day trying to raise ‘Complaints’.
His team was as strong as they come. When Slab-face Joe was shifting a shed from the Speewah out-station it got bogged in the Speewah creek. Then Slab-face really got that team into it. They pulled so hard they pulled a two-mile bend in the creek and they weren’t extended.
‘The Boss’ featured in many tales of the Speewah. He had a snout on cockatoos and covered an old red gum with bird lime to catch the flock that was eating his grain. After they landed on the tree he yelled out, ‘Got you,’ and they all took off at once. They tore that tree out by the roots and the last he saw of it, it was two miles up making south.
Hundreds of men worked on the Speewah. In fact, there were so many that they had to mix the mustard with a long-handled shovel and the cook and his assistant had to row out in a boat to sugar the tea. When shearing was on the boss had to ride up and down the board on a motor bike.
The Speewah holding itself was a tremendous size. When Uncle Harry was sent out to close the garden gate he had to take a week’s rations with him, and a jackeroo, going out to bring in the cows from the horse paddock, was gone for six months.
It was mixed country. There were mountains, salt-bush plains, and thick forests of enormous trees. Crooked Mick, bringing in a mob of three thousand sheep through the big timber, suddenly found himself in pitch darkness. For three days and nights that wretched man punched those sheep along without being able to see one of them. Then daylight snapped on again and Crooked Mick looked back. He had come through a hollow log.
Some of the hills were so steep on the Speewah that when a man rode a horse down one of them the horse’s tail hung over his shoulder and down the front of his chest, giving him the appearance of having a lank, black beard.
The Speewah was cursed with every plague. Rabbits were there in millions. They were so thick you had to pull them out of the burrows to get the ferrets in and trappers had to brush them aside to set their traps. On some of the paddocks they had to drive them out to get room to put the sheep in.
Galahs, too, were bad. When the Big Drought broke, the Speewah remained dry as a bone though the rain fell in torrents above it. The first clap of thunder had scared the galahs into flight and they were so thickly packed as they winged over the station that not a drop reached the ground. A mob of them, swooping under Crooked Mick’s hut to avoid a hawk, lifted it off the ground with the wind of their wings and carried it for thirty miles. Mick finished his breakfast while going through a belt of cloud at twenty thousand feet, the galahs still pounding along just beneath him.
The kangaroos were as big as elephants on the Speewah—some were bigger. They say that Crooked Mick and Big Bill were once climbing a hill of fur grass when they slipped and fell into a kangaroo’s pouch. The hill got up and made off with Crooked Mick and Big Bill arguing the toss as to how they would get out.
For six months those two men lived on kangaroo meat and water they got by sinking a bore in the sand that had collected in the bottom of the pouch. Then some silly cow, out with a gun, shot that kangaroo when it was in the middle of a leap. Crooked Mick and Big Bill, who were ploughing at the time, left that pouch like meteors. They were thrown fifty miles and the skid they made when they hit the earth gouged the bed of the Darling.
Women never feature in the Speewah tales. I have only heard one story in which a woman was supposed to have worked on the Speewah and I’m inclined to think it was a lie. She was a cook and her name was Gentle Annie.
The story was told to me by an old man with pale, watery eyes who lived in a hut on the Murray, and, in the telling of it, he kept glancing uneasily over his shoulder towards his hut in which I could hear a woman banging pots around and singing in a husky voice.
According to this old man the Speewah had gone, disappeared, been burnt off the map, and all because of the one and only woman who had ever worked there. Gentle Annie, so he told me, had limbs like a grey box and a frame like the kitchen of a pub. She was always singing and when she sang there was always a change for the worse in the weather. She cooked jam rolls a hundred yards long and her suet puddings had killed twenty shearers.
Once, at the shearing shed dance, she seized Crooked Mick by the beard as she was dancing the waltz cotillion with him, and kissed that horrified man squarely somewhere about where his mouth lay concealed in hair.
What a kiss that was! Its like has never been seen before or since. The whole shed rocked upon its foundations and a blue flame streaked away from the point of contact and tore three sheets of galvanized iron off the roof. A thunderous rumble rolled away across the plains and the air was full of the smell of sulphur, dynamite, gunpowder and Jockey Club perfume.
Ten fires started up at once and the roar of them was like a thousand trains going through a thousand tunnels.
For three months men fought that bushfire without a wink of sleep. They were famished for a drink of tea. As soon as they lit a camp fire to boil the billy the flames of the bushfire engulfed it.
As a last, desperate measure, Crooked Mick ran ahead of the fire at sixty miles an hour holding a billy of water back over the flames till it boiled. The tea he made saved the men but not the Speewah.
Then Big Bill came galloping up on Red Ned, the wildest brumby ever foaled. He drew one enormous breath, then gave one enormous spit and the fire went out with a sizzle.
‘What happened to Gentle Annie?’ I asked the old man.
‘I married her,’ he said with that uneasy glance at his hut.
I knew then he was a liar. No man who worked on the Speewah ever got married. It was too sissy.
Well, that was the Speewah where the grandfather clock in the homestead hall had stood in the same place for so long that the shadow of the pendulum had worn a hole in the back.
Stories of the Speewah are our folklore. While there is still time we should collect and treasure them. They are more than just tall stories of the bush. They are the unwritten literature of men who never had the opportunity to read books and who became tellers of tales instead. They are the stories of the Australian people.