Australia’s Funniest Yarns

Cocky farmers are a stock feature of Australian folksong, verse and story. Of fabulous miserliness and dourness, they are among the hardest cases of Australian characters, their tightfisted actions and attitudes featuring in many yarns. In the song ‘The Cockies of Bungaree’, for instance, the notoriously stingy small farmers of the Victorian town of Bungaree are portrayed as hard task-masters who get their workers up before dawn and make them work until after sunset and then they have to sleep with the animals.

We used to go to bed, you know, a little bit after dark,

The room we used to sleep in was just like Noah’s Ark.

There was mice and rats and dogs and cats and pigs and poulter-ee,

I’ll never forget the work we did down on Bungaree.

As in the ballad, many cocky stories involve the relationship between the farmer and his labourers.

In a characteristic cocky yarn, a labourer is hired on the basis that he stops work at sunset. When the sun goes down, he says to the cocky that it’s about time they called it a day. The cocky replies by telling him that the sun hasn’t set yet and that you can still see it if you climb up on top of the fence.

In another fable, the worker succeeds in getting the upper hand when the farmer wakes up his new labourer well before sunrise and says he needs a hand getting in the oats.

‘Are they wild oats?’ asks the sleepy labourer.

‘No,’ says the cocky, taken aback.

‘Then why do we have to sneak up on ’em in the dark!’

As for having a day off, here’s a typical cocky response. The new labourer asked the boss when he would have a day off. The cocky told him that he would have every fourth Sunday free. The labourer then wanted to know what there was to do in the area on his Sundays off. The cocky reeled off a long list, including cutting the week’s firewood, mending the harnesses, tending the vegetables and washing the horses. ‘After that, you can do whatever you like.’

The notorious tight-fistedness of the cocky farmer is also highlighted in many tales:

One night in the pub a local congratulated a cocky on the upcoming marriage of his daughter. ‘That will be the fourth wedding in your family during the last few years, won’t it?’

‘Yes,’ replied the cocky, ‘and the confetti is starting to get awful dirty.’

The drought had been on for so long that when a raindrop fell on the local cocky, he fainted clean away. They had to throw two buckets-full of dust into his face to bring him back to consciousness.

Times were so hard that all the cocky had to eat was rabbits. He had them for every meal, week in, week out. He had them stewed, he had them fried, he had them boiled, he had them braised. Eventually, his diet got the better of him and his stomach began to revolt and he decided to give himself a solid dose of Epsom salts.

But this was no help. So he went to the local doctor, who asked him what he had been eating. The cocky told him that he’d had nothing but rabbits for months. The doctor asked him if he had taken anything for his sickness and the cocky told him about the Epsom salts. ‘You don’t need Epsom salts,’ laughed the doctor, ‘you need ferrets.’

Three cocky farmers were yarning over a beer about their respective properties and how many head they could run. The first cocky came from the Riverina and said he could run three head to an acre all year long.

The second cocky from central New South Wales said that he could get two head to an acre.

The third cocky was from Bourke way and said that although it was very dry where he was, he could run 95 head to an acre.

The first two cockies expressed their disbelief in a colourful and emphatic manner, but the third cocky held his ground. ‘It’s true,’ he insisted, ‘I run one head of sheep and 94 rabbits to an acre.’

James Tyson (1819–98) was a highly successful pastoralist, or ‘squatter’, who made a fortune in acquiring rural land during the mid to late nineteenth century. Despite his wealth he lived simply, neither smoking, drinking nor swearing, probably something of a novelty for his time and geography.

In folklore, Tyson was renowned for his stinginess and known universally as ‘Hungry’ Tyson. His Scrooge-like character was even memorialised in folk speech through the saying ‘mean as Hungry Tyson’.

Sayings and yarns about Tyson echo his legendary meanness. It was said that he would travel second-class on a train only because there was no third-class carriage. He is rumoured to have once claimed that he hadn’t got rich by ‘striking matches when there was a fire to get a light by’.

Once, Hungry Tyson needed to get across to the other side of the Murrumbidgee. The cost of being ferried across in the punt was one shilling. To save having to pay the money, the tightfisted grazier swam across.

In contrast to his miserly image, Tyson was also said to be an anonymous doer of good deeds, as A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson suggests in his poem ‘T.Y.S.O.N’:

Across the Queensland border line

The mobs of cattle go;

They travel down in sun and shine

On dusty stage, and slow.

The drovers, riding slowly on

To let the cattle spread,

Will say: ‘Here’s one old landmark gone,

For old man Tyson’s dead.’

What tales there’ll be in every camp

By men that Tyson knew;

The swagmen, meeting on the tramp,

Will yarn the long day through,

And tell of how he passed as ‘Brown’,

And fooled the local men:

‘But not for me—I struck the town,

And passed the message further down;

That’s T.Y.S.O.N!’

There stands a little country town

Beyond the border line,

Where dusty roads go up and down,

And banks with pubs combine.

A stranger came to cash a cheque—

Few were the words he said—

A handkerchief about his neck,

An old hat on his head.

A long grey stranger, eagle-eyed—

‘Know me? Of course you do?’

‘It’s not my work,’ the boss replied,

‘To know such tramps as you.’

‘Well, look here, Mister, don’t be flash,’

Replied the stranger then,

‘I never care to make a splash,

I’m simple—but I’ve got the cash,

I’m T.Y.S.O.N.’

But in that last great drafting-yard,

Where Peter keeps the gate,

And souls of sinners find it barred,

And go to meet their fate,

There’s one who ought to enter in,

For good deeds done on earth;

Such deeds as merit ought to win,

Kind deeds of sterling worth.

Not by the strait and narrow gate,

Reserved for wealthy men,

But through the big gate, opened wide,

The grizzled figure, eagle-eyed,

Will travel through—and then

Old Peter’ll say: ‘We pass him through;

There’s many a thing he used to do,

Good-hearted things that no one knew;

That’s T.Y.S.O.N.’

At his death, Tyson’s estate was worth two million pounds, a fact that gave further force to an apparently existing outback folk belief that the money was cursed, as a literary-minded contemporary wrote shortly after the pastoralist died:

Tyson died alone in the night in his lonely bush station, with thousands of stock on it, but with no hand to give him even a drink of water, and no voice to soothe or to console him in his last struggle with death. He was hurriedly buried. No requiem was sung at his grave. He died, and was forgotten. Only his millions, which Bacon called ‘muck’, and Shakespeare ‘rascally counters’, remained for his shoal of relatives to fight for through the law courts. Some of them were but struggling for an overdose of mortal poison, as the gold proved to be to some persons at least.

There is a strange legend regarding this man’s money. The old hands out back will tell you that every coin of it is cursed, and if we follow the havoc some of the money has caused, there is much food for the superstitious mind.

Tyson’s folktale image is similar to that of another wealthy pastoralist of a slightly later era, Sidney (later Sir) Kidman (1857–1935). Many tales of miserliness are told of both men.

A character featuring in a number of Tasmanian folktales is usually known as ‘Ninety the Glutton’. As his name suggests, Ninety was notorious for his appetite and the large amounts of food he could consume.

Tradition has it that Ninety got his unusual name when he was looking after a mob of sheep in Tasmania’s Lake Country for a period of three months. When he brought in the mob for shearing, it was found that he was 90 sheep short. On being questioned about the fate of the sheep, a surprised Ninety simply said that he had eaten one each day for his rations.

Ninety was said to have been a wanderer who turned up at various places in Tasmania in search of work—and food. Any wise property owner was usually happy to give him one large feed and send him on his way. But on one occasion Ninety came to the Malahide Estate and asked the owner for a meal. As he had a crate of apples that were about to go bad, the owner said that Ninety could eat them. About an hour later, he saw Ninety sitting amid a pile of apple cores. He looked up and asked, ‘What time’s dinner, Boss?’

There are numerous other Ninety tales, as well as stories about a similar Queensland character known as ‘Tom the Glutton’ who was able to consume a crate of bananas, sometimes including the skins, in just ten minutes.

Galloping Jones is usually said to have been a historical figure of Northern Queensland folklore, and to have died in 1960. Jones was a bush fighter, a drinker, a stock-stealer and a bank robber. His antics included stealing stock, selling it and stealing it back again the very same night.

Once Galloping Jones was arrested by a policeman and an Aboriginal tracker for illegally slaughtering a cow. The evidence was the cow’s hide, prominently marked with someone else’s brand. On the way back to town, Jones and his captors camped. Jones managed to get the policeman and his assistant drunk and when they fell asleep, he rode off into the night. However, instead of escaping, he returned a few hours later with a fresh cow hide which he substituted for the evidence carried by the policeman. Next day the party arrived in town, where Jones was tried for his crime. When they pulled the evidence from the bag, they found the hide bore Jones’s brand and the case was dismissed.

In another story, Jones was again captured by a young policeman who he fooled into letting him go behind a bush to relieve himself. Of course, Jones escaped and the policeman had to return to town without his captive. When he got to town to report his failure to the sergeant, who was in his usual ‘office’, the pub, there was Jones, washed and shaved and having a beer. The embarrassed policeman threatened to shoot Jones, but the trickster just said that he felt the need for a clean-up and a drink and that he would now be happy to stroll down to the lock-up.

Galloping Jones traditions are very much in the mould of the larger-than-life pioneer heroes of the American west, with more than a touch of the trickster. Many stories concerning Galloping Jones are also told of the Queensland trickster, Snuffler Oldfield.

Christy (also Christie) Palmerston (c. 1850?–97) was a historical character of Northern Queensland in the 1870s and 80s around whom a good many yarns have developed. Most of these centre on his alleged origins as the bastard son of the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, his ability to terrify Aboriginal and Chinese people, his toughness and ability to live off the land, and his shady, sometimes lethally criminal, activities including murdering Aborigines. He is also said to have hidden caches of gold in various places and to have narrowly escaped death on numerous occasions.

The historical Christy Palmerston was probably Cristofero Palmerston Carandini, who seems to have arrived in Northern Queensland in the early to mid 1870s. Probably attracted like many others by the prospect of finding gold, Palmerston established a reputation as a wayfinder, pioneering several routes to and from various points, including Port Douglas, later Darwin. In the late 1870s Palmerston conducted a questionable enterprise with several hundred Chinese diggers, effectively imprisoning them on the Russell River goldfield, exploiting them for labour and as customers of his monopoly supply business. He married shortly after this, briefly ran a pub in Townsville then worked in Borneo and Malaya. He died of fever in Malaya in 1897 at a relatively young age, though tradition has it that he died in New Guinea, as it was then known, at a ripe old age.

Like quite a few folk heroes around the world, Palmerston is a composite character with both good and bad attributes. He is commemorated in both Queensland folklore and official place-names.

In the 1960s and 70s the folklorist Ron Edwards collected a number of Christy Palmerston yarns in Queensland. In one of these stories, it is said that Palmerston and his Aboriginal co-workers murdered a dozen other Aborigines who were attempting to steal from his Russell River enterprise. He took to the bush for five years, successfully evading capture by the police. According to this story, if he undertook to survey the Millaa Millaa to Innisfail route, he would be pardoned for his crime.

Welshman Joseph Bolitho Johns (1827?–1900) was transported from England to Western Australia in 1853. He absconded, was captured and escaped repeatedly throughout the late 1880s, becoming a celebrated identity in the Swan River colony, later Western Australia, under the folk name ‘Moondyne Joe’. Joe’s ability to escape was so frequently displayed that he became a local hero. While the only song extant about Joe is a parody of the nursery rhyme ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, in its brevity can be detected that set of tensions and conflicts between unpopular authority and those suffering beneath it that typically underlie outlaw heroes:

The Governor’s son has got the pip

The governor’s got the measles

Moondyne Joe has give ’em the slip,

Pop! goes the weasel.

Joe was able to survive so well in the bush due to a network of friends and sympathisers. Folk traditions about Moondyne Joe include his many escapes, his cleverness and his buried gold. As well as featuring as the hero of folksong and verse, Joe still leads a lively folkloric existence as the central character of a group of folktales.

Many of these stories concern Joe’s legendary escaping abilities. Arrested for unlawfully killing a horse that had supposedly eaten the oats Joe had lovingly provided for his favourite pony, he was imprisoned in Toodyay (then Newcastle) lock-up. Because he did not consider that he had done anything wrong, Joe promptly escaped, taking the warder’s pistol with him for good measure.

Another of Joe’s escapes is said to have occurred at the Mahogany Inn on the Great Eastern Highway. This was supposed to be one of Joe’s many hide-outs. The police found out about it and, just as they arrived, Joe escaped through an upstairs window, jumping down onto a police horse, which he galloped away to freedom.

There are also stories about Joe escaping from gaols in Perth, York and Fremantle. According to one story, the escape from Fremantle Prison, in March 1867, involved Joe crossing the new Fremantle Bridge before it could be officially opened by Governor Hampton, so thumbing his nose at officialdom once again.

Apart from escape stories, one of the most commonly heard Moondyne Joe yarns has the bushranger being caught in the cellars of a local winery—which winery is disputed—dead drunk. Although this has been authoritatively refuted on a number of occasions, it is a persistent belief in and around Perth, helped along by the local tourism industry.

Released from prison in 1871, Joe made a fresh start as an honest worker, and later married. He received some literary romanticisation in the novel Moondyne by John Boyle O’Reilly (1887). Joseph Johns ended his days as an almost forgotten ex-convict pauper in the Fremantle Asylum, where he died in 1900.

A relatively well-developed heroine tradition concerns ‘The Eulo Queen’. She is at once a named individual about whom tales are told and also a representative type common in Australian folklore and popular culture, the barmaid, and, it is strongly suggested in her legend, the gold-digging prostitute.

The Eulo Queen—sometimes ‘Eulo Belle’—is thought to have been a woman named Isabel Gray. She was variously said to have been born in England or Mauritius probably in 1851 and to have been the illegitimate daughter of a British army captain. She was apparently sent to Australia around 1868, marrying the first of three husbands. From the mid-1880s she was the publican of the Eulo Hotel (or Hall), as well as a number of other drinking and commercial establishments in the small Queensland opal-mining town of that name, about 70 kilometres west of Cunnamulla. Eulo was on the legendary Paroo Track, a notoriously hot, dry and dusty way described unattractively in Henry Lawson’s poem ‘The Paroo’:

It was a week from Christmas-time,

As near as I remember,

And half a year since in the rear

We’d left the Darling Timber.

The track was hot and more than drear;

The long day seemed forever;

Put now we knew that we were near

Our camp—the Paroo River.

With blighted eyes and blistered feet,

With stomachs out of order,

Half mad with flies and dust and heat

We’d crossed the Queensland Border.

I longed to hear a stream go by

And see the circles quiver;

I longed to lay me down and die

That night on Paroo River.

’Tis said the land out West is grand—

I do not care who says it—

It isn’t even decent scrub,

Nor yet an honest desert;

It’s plagued with flies, and broiling hot,

A curse is on it ever;

I really think that God forgot

The country round that river.

The Eulo Queen was a noted beauty and, with little competition in that part of the country, attracted many admirers, growing wealthy on the gifts they bestowed upon her. These enabled her to pursue a flamboyant lifestyle, further adding to her legend. It is said that she gained her name when ejecting a drunken patron from her establishment, yelling at him: ‘I’m the Eulo queen—now get out!’ She was thereafter known by this name, to which she is said to have made no objections.

After World War I the town declined as a centre for opals and transport and the Eulo Queen, estranged from her third husband, fell on hard times. She died in a Toowoomba psychiatric hospital in 1929, reputedly in her nineties and with only thirty pounds to her name.

Also known as ‘Russian Jack’, ‘Wheelbarrow Jack’ was a 22-year-old Russian Finn who arrived in Western Australia in the late 1880s to follow the goldrushes in the Kimberley region. He was thought to be two metres tall, had an abnormally large chest and extraordinary strength. Like many other heroic characters of Australian tradition, Jack flits continually between historical fact and folklore.

A popular method for travelling across the desert to the remote Kimberley goldfields was to use wooden wheelbarrows. Jack built one to carry his goods overland to the diggings. It was unusually large, matching his strength, and with it he was said to be able to carry loads of 50 kilograms or more. He left Derby for the Kimberley in company with another hopeful who became sick along the way. Jack loaded the man’s goods and, after he became too sick to walk, the man himself onto his barrow and wheeled him far along the track until the ailing passenger died.

There are numerous stories of other such incidents in which Jack used his strength, stamina and his barrow to rescue exhausted prospectors in the desert and carry them to safety. When Daisy Bates, herself a colourful figure, came across Jack outside the Peak Hill goldfield in 1907, he was working as a groom and as a market gardener, an occupation that suited his legendary appetite. According to Bates, he was still lending a helping hand to those in need.

These acts of charity became legendary in the West—and further afield—as an exemplar of mateship. Around these mostly documented good deeds was woven a web of less reliable tales that nevertheless reflect the esteem in which Jack’s deeds were held in the frontier country of the north-west.

Jack went hunting kangaroo with a mate who had an accident and broke his leg. Jack loaded him onto his barrow and wheeled him into town. The townsfolk gathered round to admire yet another of Jack’s great feats of endurance. Jack boasted that he had pushed his mate over many miles of hard country. Still lying on the wheelbarrow, his mate piped up to say that Jack had managed to hit every rock along the way.

When Jack worked at the Mount Morgan goldmine, he fell down a shaft. Badly injured, he lay there for three days until they found him. His only concern was said to be that he had missed his shift at the mine.

Some yarns tell of Jack’s great strength. Once, while working for a station owner, he was given the sack. In his anger, Jack bent a thick crowbar across his knees.

Jack’s only real failing was his love for the grog. It was said that a coach driver stopped near Jack’s lodgings and offered him a swig of whisky. At first, Jack declined, saying he was off the grog. Prevailed upon to have a small drink, he swallowed half the bottle of whisky at once. Ruefully looking at his now-empty bottle, the driver said that if that was Jack not drinking, he would hate to see him when he was.

In another incident, said to have taken place in the gold town of Cue, Jack’s love of alcohol almost got the better of him. After a few beers too many, he loaded up his barrow to make the trek back to his camp a few miles out of town. On top he carelessly threw a box of firing caps for the dynamite he also carried on his barrow. Seeing Jack weave unsteadily down the street, the local policeman decided to escort him out of town for everyone’s safety. Along the way the policeman spotted the firing caps and decided to arrest Jack. As Wheelbarrow Jack was an extremely powerful man, as well as extremely drunk, this presented the policeman with a difficult situation. The policeman managed to steer the merrily singing Jack towards the police tents, where a number of other policemen offered Jack a cup of tea while they repacked his wheelbarrow to make it safe.

Jack dozed off and the police handcuffed him to a very large log outside the police tents. They then went to attend to matters elsewhere, leaving Jack asleep at the log. When they returned they were astonished to find that Jack and the log had disappeared. They followed the marks in the sand to the local pub, finding Jack drinking a beer with his unchained hand. The other one was still chained to the log propped up on the bar. Jack had woken in the night with a terrible thirst. He had casually lifted the log and gone in search of a waterbag. He found one in the police tent, drained it and went back to sleep until the fierce sun woke him the next morning. Now thirstier than ever, Jack simply threw the log onto his shoulder and made for the pub. ‘Have a drink with me and I’ll go back to gaol,’ said Jack. But rather than drink on duty, the policeman followed Jack, still shouldering the giant log, back to the police tents where they shared a billy of tea. A now-sober Jack made off for his diggings with a safe load.

Wheelbarrow Jack died in Fremantle in 1904. During his life on the north-western Australian goldfields, he was the subject of considerable journalistic interest and attracted the attention of Mary Durack and Ernestine Hill, among many others. After his death, his life was recalled in several newspapers:

An old identity, John Fredericks—but a hundred times better known as ‘Russian Jack’—died a few days ago. His death came as a surprise for no one could imagine death in the prime of life to one of such Herculean strength. He was, so far as physical manhood is concerned, a picture, but he combined the strength of a lion with the tenderness of a woman. Though he had a loud-sounding sonorous voice that seemed to come out of his boots, there was no more harm in it than the chirp of a bird. Many instances are known of his uniform good nature, but his extraordinary kindness, some years ago, to a complete stranger—that he picked up on the track in the Kimberley gold rush—exemplified his mateship. The stranger had a wheelbarrow and some food, and the burly Russian picked the stranger up, placed him on his own large wheelbarrow, together with his meagre possessions, and wheeled him nearly 300 miles (480 kms) to a haven of refuge.

It was the travel writer and journalist Ernestine Hill who first suggested a statue be raised to commemorate Jack’s deeds and legend. This initiative was carried forward by many others and led eventually to the erection of the statue of the outback hero at Hall’s Creek in 1979. The statue depicts the hero in his Good Samaritan role carrying a sick digger a great distance through the desert in his wooden wheelbarrow.

Wheelbarrow Jack is a Western Australian version of a folktale type known as ‘German Charlie’ stories. While the heroes of such tales are not always called ‘German Charlie’, they are usually nicknamed in a way that draws attention to their national or ethnic origins. The characteristics of these stories are that they bring some special, unusual or exaggerated skill or attribute to an Australian community. Using that skill in helpful, often humorous, sometimes absurd ways, German Charlies become accepted members of their communities and feature in commonly told tales of their real and fancied exploits. Jack’s wheelbarrow, his assistance to the needy, his strength and his prodigious boozing all combine to make him another example of a type of hard case found all around Australia.

Another hard case named Jack came into being on the Western Front in World War I. He was said to have been a member of the 3rd Battalion and stood out from the crowd because of a chronic stutter and the speed with which he retorted—verbally or physically—to any perceived slight. Long Jack’s exploits were recorded by an anonymous contributor to the Third Battalion Magazine, sometime around 1917:

There are certain characters, which pass through our Battalion life, which are more than worth perpetuating. Such a one was long Jack Dean. In regard to his figure he was an outsider, as he was 6½ feet tall and as slender as a whippet. As a wit he stood alone. A man needed more than ordinary morale to meet him on this ground, and many who purposely or inadvertently engaged him have cause to be sorry for themselves, but glad that they were a party to adding another witty victory to Jack’s account. The quickness and smartness of his retorts took the sting from them, and there was no more popular man in the unit than he. This sketch aims at reproducing some stories which came from him, and through which the man himself may be seen.

At the outbreak of war, or soon afterwards he presented himself before the Recruiting Officers, but his physique was against him. His keenness, however, was proof against his setback, and he came again and again, only to meet with the same result. At last, he asked with his inimitable stutter; ‘If you c-c-can’t t-take me as a s-s-soldier—s-s-send me-me as a m-m-mascot!’

The Recruiting Officer had become used to his applications, and, recognising the keenness of the man he was dealing with, answered: ‘I’ll tell you what I shall do. Bring me twelve receipts, and I shall accept you’. ‘Done!’ said Jack. ‘It’s a bargain’. He turned up with seventeen fit men and was taken on strength. One can imagine him taking his place among the other recruits at the training depot. His ‘length without breadth’ immediately singled him out as a butt and one misguided youth was foolish enough to say as he passed him; ‘Smell the gum-leaves’. ‘Yes’, said Jack; ‘feel the branches’. And his long, wiry right shot out with good effect.

He must have been the despair of all that tried to make a smart soldier out of him. Working on the coal face does not keep a long man supple; but in due time he arrived in France, and joined the Battalion—just in time to face the second time ‘in’ on the Somme. He quickly made himself at home, and in a very short time was known to everybody in the Battalion. It is said that Colonel Howell Price asked him if he had any brothers. ‘Y-yes, sir,’ he answered: ‘one—he’s t-t-taller than me, b-but n-not n-n-nearly so well developed’.

Being thin made him appear taller than he actually was, and his height was always the point in question to those who were not used to it. A Tommy saw him ambling along the road very much the worse for wear as a result of a tour in the line and in the mud. ‘Reach me down a star, choom,’ said the Tommy. ‘Take your pick out of these, sonny,’ was Jack’s answer, together with a very forceful uppercut to the chin. Our late Brigadier never failed to talk to Jack when he met him.

‘Good-day, Jack,’ was his invariable greeting. ‘G-g-g-good day, Brig.,’ was always Jack’s reply, and it never failed to amuse Brigadier Leslie.

There is one other story which illustrates J.D.’s democratic soul. The Brigadier stopped to have a word with him, and remarked that he wasn’t getting any fatter. ‘How the hell can a man get fat on 8 to a loaf?’ was the response.

Jack’s feet were always his worst enemy, and they were the cause of him falling to the rear on one occasion, during a rather stiff route march. He was getting along as best he could when he came up with the Brigadier. ‘What Jack! You out!’ said the latter. ‘Me blanky p-p-p-paddles h-have gone on me, Brig,’ replied Jack.

It is only possible to write this sketch because the subject is no longer with us. We hope he is now on his way to Australia as he has done his bit well, and had come to that stage when he could not effectively carry on. While waiting for the Board which was to examine and determine his future, one of the Sisters like all who saw him for the first time, said; ‘What a lot of disadvantages there must be for such a tall man’. ‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘The greatest trouble I have is with the rum issue; it dries up before it hits my stomach’.

Jack will remain in our memories and we are grateful to him for these and many other sayings of his which have amused us at all times when we needed the lift of genuine amusement.

The Western Australian cray (lobster) fishing industry has long been a tough and colourful way to earn a living. The industry and its workers have generated extensive folktale traditions, including stories about a folk hero known as ‘Diabolical Dick’. In the manner of all occupational heroes, Dick has larger than life encounters with outsize crays, giant waves and ‘occkies’ (octopus) who get their tentacles caught in his steel-bottomed craypots and clank around the seafloor all night, disturbing humans and wildlife along the Geraldton coast. He finally dissuades them by encircling his craypots with barbed wire. On one occasion, Dick sailed so far off the Western Australian coast that he was just about in Africa, returning to port with a couple of assegais and arrows embedded in the wheelhouse.

On another cray trip, Dick laid his pots in a wave so big that when it crashed one of the pots was propelled so far inland, it was halfway to the Warburton Ranges, where it felled a passing ’roo. The tale continues in like vein: ‘This is, however, not a common occurrence, as few pots land east of Meekatharra in these circumstances, though they are listed as air navigational hazards by MMA pilots.’

A popular cook yarn involved a Chinese cook who was managing to serve up delicious food for some weeks. Suddenly, the delectable pies and stews ceased. The shearers asked the cook why he was no longer serving up his greatly anticipated dishes. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘No more puppy, no more pie.’

This oft-told story has been treated in literature by Brunton Stephens in his ‘My Other Chinese Cook’ in the late 1880s and its central motif, the European suspicion that Chinese food is largely cats and dogs, also appears in modern urban legends.

Whenever a pet cat or dog goes missing in Australia, it is inevitably suggested by someone that the distressed owner check the local Chinese restaurant. This relatively light-hearted prejudice is also the pivot of a popular modern legend, often known as ‘The Chinese Restaurant’, though the version below, collected in Perth in 1987, is called ‘Dog’s Dinner’, for reasons that will be obvious:

I read in the paper that this well-to-do French couple went to Hong Kong or China or somewhere and they went to this local restaurant with their pet poodle for a meal. They asked the waiters for a meal for their dog, as well as for themselves, but there was a bit of a language barrier. But anyway they got it sorted out at last and the waiters took their dog out to the kitchen to look after it. Later on their meal was brought out to them, and when they took the covers off the dishes they found their meal was their dog!

The Chinese restaurant story is well known and heard in all sorts of places. It is also set in all sorts of places. Frequently it is overseas, especially Hong Kong, Singapore or Malaysia. It was reported in Zurich by Reuters news service as early as 1971. A Scandinavian version is set in Paris—with a rat in the dinner instead of a dog. A version collected in Queensland in 1988 locates the restaurant in not-very-exotic Adelaide and identifies the dog as a chihuahua.

According to the story, a couple visited a restaurant with their pet dog, usually a chihuahua or one of the smaller breeds, and asked for a meal. The waiter had trouble understanding them but eventually picked up the pet dog and took it to the kitchen, where the couple assumed the man was going to feed it. After some time he returned with a covered plate. Upon taking off the lid, the couple found their pet dog, cooked and served with bamboo shoots and other garnishes, sometimes on a bed of rice, sometimes with an apple or orange in its mouth. The couple usually suffer a nervous breakdown and return home immediately.

There is still a widespread belief that Chinese, Vietnamese and other ‘Asian’ restaurants cook dogs and cats, usually scoured from the local neighbourhood. Such expressions do not seem to stop Australians from frequently dining at these restaurants. The ‘poodle with noodles’ legend, as it has also been dubbed, refuses to go away and is still leading a more than healthy life on the internet and in emails.

Sometimes said to be as old as the Boer War (1899–1902), the elaborate anecdote usually known as ‘The World’s Greatest Whinger’ probably dates only from World War II. It lives mainly in print and is given here in one of many such versions, but draws on the venerable tradition of unusually developed attributes to achieve its widely appreciated effect:

I struck him first on a shearing station in outback Queensland. He was knocking the fleeces from a four-year-old wether when I asked him the innocent question: ‘How are you?’

He didn’t answer immediately, but waited till he had carved the last bit of wool from the sheep, allowing it to regain its feet. Kicking it through the door, dropping the shears and spitting a stream of what looked like molten metal about three yards. Then he fixed me with a pair of malevolent eyes in which fires of a deep hatred seemed to burn, and he pierced me with them as he said:

‘How would I be? How would you bloody well expect me to be? Get a load of me, will you? Dags on every inch of me bloody hide; drinking me own bloody sweat; swallowing dirt with every breath I breathe; shearing sheep which should have been dogs’ meat years ago; working for the lousiest bastard in Australia; and frightened to leave because the old woman has got some bloody hound looking for me with a bloody maintenance order.

‘How would I be? I haven’t tasted a beer for weeks, and the last glass I had was knocked over by some clumsy bastard before I’d finished it.’

The next time I saw him was in Sydney. He had just joined the A.I.F. He was trying to get into a set of webbing and almost ruptured himself in the process. I said to him: ‘How would you be, Dig?’

He almost choked before replying. ‘How would I be? How would I bloody well be? Take a gander at me, will you? Get a load of this bloody outfit—look at me bloody hat, size nine and a half and I take six and a half. Get a bloody eyeful of these strides! Why, you could hide a bloody brewery horse in the seat of them and still have room for me! Get on this shirt—just get on the bloody thing, will you? Get on these bloody boots; why, there’s enough leather in the bastard to make a full set of harness. And some know-all bastard told me this was a men’s outfit!

‘How would I be? How would I bloody well be!’

I saw him next in Tobruk. He was seated on an upturned box, tin hat over one eye, cigarette butt hanging from his bottom lip, rifle leaning against one knee, and he was engaged in trying to clean his nails with the tip of his bayonet. I should have known better, but I asked him: ‘How would you be, Dig?’

He swallowed the butt and fixed me a really mad look. ‘How would I be? How would I bloody well be! How would you expect me to be? Six months in this bloody place, being shot at by every Fritz in Africa; eating bloody sand with every meal; flies in me hair and eyes; frightened to sleep a bloody wink expecting to die in this bloody place; and copping the bloody crow whenever there’s a handout by anybody.

‘How would I be? How would I bloody well be!’

The last time I saw him was in Paradise, and his answer to my question was: ‘How would I be? How would I bloody well be! Get an eyeful of this bloody nightgown, will you? A man trips over the bloody thing fifty times a day, and it takes a man ten minutes to lift the bloody thing when he wants to scratch his shin!

‘Get a gander at this bloody right wing—feathers missing everywhere. A man must be bloody well moulting!

‘Get an eyeful of this bloody halo! Only me bloody ears keep the rotten thing on me skull—and look at the bloody dents on the bloody thing!

‘How would I be? Cast your eyes on this bloody harp. Five bloody strings missing, and there’s a band practice in five minutes!

‘How would I be, you ask. How would you expect a bloody man to bloody well be?’

The street gangs of Sydney and Melbourne are almost as old as the cities themselves. In Sydney, the ‘Cabbage Tree Mob’ was frequently mentioned in negative terms in the local press: ‘There are to be found all round the doors of the Sydney Theatre a sort of loafer known as the Cabbage-Tree Mob. The Cabbage-Tree Mob are always up for a “spree” and some of their pastimes are so rough an order as to deserve to be repaid with bloody coxcombs.’

Probably not a coherent gang or ‘push’ so much as an occasional assembly of young working-class men, the mob was distinguished by the kind of headgear they favoured, a hat made from cabbage tree fronds. Whatever their exact nature, the cabbage tree mob hung around theatres, race grounds and markets, and specialised in cat-calling and otherwise harassing the respectable middle classes. Some of them were ex-convicts, some were descended from convict stock.

By the 1870s, groups of this sort were being called ‘larrikins’. Their favoured pastimes were a development of the earlier troublemakers and included disrupting Salvation Army meetings with volleys of rotten vegetables, rocks and the odd dead cat. The larrikins were also noted for dancing with young women friends, events often portrayed by journalists as ‘orgies’. By the 1880s observers began to speak of larrikin ‘pushes’ or gangs, also sometimes referred to as the ‘talent’. These were usually associated with particular suburbs or areas. In Sydney there were the ‘Haymarket Bummers’, the ‘Rocks Push’, the ‘Cow Lane Push’ and the ‘Woolloomooloo Push’. In Melbourne, it was the ‘Fitzroy Forties’ and the ‘Stephen Street Push’, as well as the surely ironic ‘Flying Angels’, among others. The pushes were mostly male, young and with a strong loyalty ethic, each supporting the others when needed.

The larrikins revelled in fighting with police, resisting arrest, and there were notable pitched battles between them and large groups of police in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Despite, or because of, their criminality and anti-social behaviour, the crudely colourful larrikins soon became the objects of literary interest. Henry Lawson’s ‘The Captain of the Push’ was an early rendering of the larrikin culture.

Based loosely on real events, ‘The Captain of the Push’ (also unprintably parodied as ‘The Bastard from the Bush’) begins:

As the night was falling slowly down on city, town and bush,

From a slum in Jones’s Alley sloped the Captain of the Push;

And he scowled towards the North, and he scowled towards the South,

As he hooked his little finger in the corners of his mouth.

Then his whistle, loud and shrill, woke the echoes of the ‘Rocks’,

And a dozen ghouls came sloping round the corners of the blocks.

The ghouls, called the ‘Gory Bleeders’, ‘spoke the gutter language’ of the slums and brothels and swore fearsomely and fulsomely with every breath. Their ‘captain’ is:

… bottle-shouldered, pale and thin,

For he was the beau-ideal of a Sydney larrikin;

E’en his hat was most suggestive of the city where we live,

With a gallows-tilt that no one, save a larrikin, can give.

He wears the larrikin outfit of tight bell-bottom trousers, elaborate boots, uncollared shirt and necktie. The gang encounters a stranger in the street who turns out to be a man from the bush who wants to join the gang. He has read of their exploits in the ‘Weekly Gasbag’, and sitting alone in his bush humpy decided that he:

‘Longed to share the dangers and the pleasures of the push!

‘Gosh! I hate the swells and good ’uns—I could burn ’em in their beds;

‘I am with you, if you’ll have me, and I’ll break their blazing heads.’

The larrikins demand to know if the bushman would match them in perfidy and violence. Would he punish an informer who breaks the code of loyalty? ‘Would you lay him out and kick him to a jelly on the ground?’ Would he ‘smash a bleedin’ bobbie’, ‘break a swell or Chinkie’ and ‘have a moll to keep yer’? To all of which the stranger answers, ‘My Kerlonial oath, I would!’ They test him practically by asking him to smash a window. The stranger is sworn in and becomes an exemplary larrikin, if a little over-zealous even for the Gory Bleeders. One morning the captain wakes and finds the stranger gone:

Quickly going through the pockets of his ‘blooming’ bags, he learned

That the stranger had been through him for the stuff his ‘moll’ had earned;

And the language that he muttered I should scarcely like to tell.

(Stars! and notes of exclamation!! blank and dash will do as well).

The rest of the bleeders soon forget the bloke who briefly joined them and robbed their leader. But the captain: ‘Still is laying round in ballast, for the nameless from the bush.’

Louis Stone’s flawed masterpiece, Jonah (1911), presented a more realistic picture of the Sydney slum lifestyle that produced and nourished the larrikins. Its eponymous hero makes his own fortune by hard work and astute business sense, though forfeits his working-class roots, loses in love and fails as a decent human being in the process.

Probably taking his lead from this approach, C.J. Dennis began writing the verse that would eventually become the much-loved characters of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and The Moods of Ginger Mick. Soft Bill, ‘the Bloke’, his love Doreen and his friend the street rabbit-seller, Ginger Mick, together with others who hung around Melbourne’s ‘Little Lon’, were highly romanticised and bore almost no resemblance to the realities of the street. But the verse novellas chronicling their imaginary doings sold in very great numbers, making Dennis a wealthy man and establishing the ‘rough diamond’ with a soft centre stereotype of the larrikin, recycled for decades in stage shows and the early Australian cinema. The image lives on still.

The Anzacs were not the only troops to souvenir all manner of items from the field of battle, but they were noted exponents of the art, as suggested in a couple of Digger yarns:

On the Western Front, a sergeant halted the enormous Private Smith, who was wearing a spiked German helmet.

‘Who gave you permission to wear German issue?’ he asked.

‘Please, sergeant,’ said Private Smith, ‘don’t make me give this lid up; I had to kill seven Germans to get my size.’

The sergeant looked at Private Smith’s feet. ‘If you ever lose your boots,’ he said, ‘the flamin’ war’s over.’

It is well known to most front line Diggers that the Aussie official photographer was one of the gamest men in the war. One day he was taking the usual risks, oblivious of all considerations but that of getting a good picture. A purposeful Digger was seen stalking him from shell-hole to shell-hole.

‘What in th’ll yer doing, Ginger?’ yelled a cobber.

‘Oh, it’s all right. I’m just waiting for this photo bloke to get knocked. I want to souvenir his camera!’

The story of the colourful character who became known as ‘The Souvenir King’ is full of folklore as much as fact. John Hines, known as ‘Barney’, was born in Liverpool in 1873. After many years of roughing it around the world, he ended up in Australia, enlisting in the AIF in 1915 and becoming a member of the 45th Battalion. On the Western Front he proved to be, like so many other ‘bad characters’, as good at soldiering as he was bad at staying sober, obeying orders and otherwise knuckling down to military discipline. In addition to his apparent fearlessness and talent for taking large numbers of prisoners, Barney had a very special ability with souvenirs.

Souveniring—also known as ‘ratting’—was a popular pastime of Australian troops. It involved obtaining items of enemy equipment—clothing, weaponry, medals or anything else that might be worth a few bob. Whether these items were obtained from Germans after they no longer had a need for them or if they were ‘liberated’ from prisoners was of no consequence. Possession, as they say, was nine points of the law. So efficient was Barney at obtaining his trophies that he was dubbed ‘The Souvenir King’ and generally recognised as the finest exponent of the art. It was not only the number and range of items that Barney managed to filch from enemy sources, or elsewhere, but also their occasional oddity or extravagance. On one occasion he souvenired a grandfather clock. Another time saw a full barrel of English beer added to his stocks.

To be fair, Barney was far from being the only collector of questionable mementos in the AIF or any other army. It was the publication of an evocative photograph taken by Frank Hurley of Barney sitting with a pile of his keepsakes that provided him with a raffish celebrity around which grew quite a few legends. The most widespread of these is the most unlikely tale that when the German head of state, Kaiser Wilhelm, heard of Barney’s looting he placed a price on his head, encouraging German troops to hunt The Souvenir King down. His notorious reputation for unhappy dealings with authority also generated the story that he was once arrested by British Military Police but caused so much trouble to them that he was soon handed back to his unit. His battlefield bravery led to the folk belief that he had killed more German soldiers than any other member of the AIF.

Barney was wounded on several occasions and was given a medical discharge in 1916. But he re-enlisted and went back to fight and souvenir for another year or so until he was again discharged for health reasons in 1918. He returned to Australia, where he set up house in a humpy on the fringes of Sydney, eking out a living with various forms of manual and itinerant labour and, of course, selling souvenirs. It is said that he took the train into the suburbs each week to deliver a sack of vegetables to ex-soldiers in the repatriation hospital. Occasional republication of the famous photograph briefly revived his notoriety from time to time. When war again began in 1939, Barney tried to enlist but was rejected due to his age. He died in 1958.

The possibly historical Mrs Delaney is a character well known in railway lore and legend. Said to hail from Tasmania and to have lived sometime before World War I (1914–18), she was a fruit-seller with a quick wit and a sharp tongue. Her stories are also frequently ribald, though the story of her encounter with another legend, the wealthy politician King O’Malley, focuses on her ability to answer back and to take no nonsense.

According to the story, O’Malley was travelling on the Hobart train and noticed that the well-known figure of the fruit-seller had become rather plump since his last journey. Ungallantly, he prodded her ample behind and asked what she intended to call the baby. Mrs Delaney is said to have replied that if it was a boy, he would be called after Saint Patrick. If it was a girl, she would be Brigid after her mother. ‘But if it is what I think it is, all piss and wind, I’ll call it after you.’

The racetrack has long been the stamping ground of hard cases of all types. This tale of the turf involves the practice of ‘doping’ a horse in order to make it—usually—run faster. There are many ways to do this, most of them more folkloric than scientific:

A not very sophisticated trainer makes up some dope and absorbs it into a sugar cube. While he is slipping the cube to his horse before the race begins, the Chief Steward of the track, or ‘stipe’, catches him. ‘What are you feeding that horse?’ he demands to know.

The trainer replies that it is just a treat for the horse before the race to calm the horse down in the starting gate. Seeing that the ‘stipe’ is still suspicious, the trainer seeks to reassure him by eating one of the cubes himself. The ‘stipe’ then demands to try one as well, but apparently finds nothing wrong with it and continues on his way, leaving the trainer free to saddle his horse for the race. While doing this, the trainer whispers to the jockey to let the doped horse simply run the race: ‘Give him his head and don’t use the whip.’

‘But what if someone starts coming at me in the straight?’ asks the jockey.

‘Don’t worry,’ replies the trainer, ‘it will only be me or the bloody stipe.’

An oft-told tale of the turf involves a city bookie taking his horse from the city to a country race meeting. He decides to get the jockey to run the horse ‘dead’, meaning that it will lose the race even though it is a good horse. He inflates the odds to 2–1.

A punter then approaches the bookie to make a bet on a three-horse race. Depending on which version of the story is being told, either the punter or the bookie pumps up the odds on the favourite to the point where the punter has laid out a lot of money. The race begins and the favourite, despite being held back by the jockey, still somehow wins against the other two unbelievably slow local horses. At this point the bookie, facing a very large pay-out, snarls at the punter and says something like, ‘Hey, mate, you think you’re pretty bloody clever, don’t you? But you didn’t know I owned the favourite.’

Bea (sometimes ‘Bee’ or just ‘B’) Miles was one of Sydney’s great eccentrics. Born in 1902, she had a difficult relationship with her middle-class family from an early age. At Abbottsleigh school, she made political comments and wrote essays criticising the conduct of World War I, which was then raging. An inheritance allowed her to become financially independent but conflicts with her father over what was then considered her immoral Bohemian lifestyle continued. After a brief enrolment at Sydney University, Bea contracted encephalitis. The disease reportedly sharpened her independent outlook and what some considered her anti-social behaviour, allowing her father to commit her to the insane asylum at Gladesville in 1923.

Bea remained in the asylum until 1925, when an article about her plight titled ‘Mad House Mystery of Beautiful Sydney Girl’ on the front page of the Smith’s Weekly newspaper led to her eventual release. Bea then became a notorious ratbag about town, sleeping rough, jumping into stationary cars with a demand to be given a lift and reciting Shakespeare on street corners to anyone who would pay. But her main pastime was boarding taxis and refusing to pay the fare. She became the scourge of the Sydney taxi industry, with most drivers dreading her presence. Three racegoers encountered Bea in the mid-1950s:

The lady was large, very vocal; and she wore a worse-for-wear tennis shade rakishly tilted over one eye. She sat beside the worried-looking taximan piloting yours, etc., and a couple more males to try our luck at the races. She offered to bet us a couple of bob each that the taxi wouldn’t pass more than 39 cars on our way from Ashfield to Canterbury. Recovering, we declined politely. Foiled, the lady went to work on the driver, issuing loud commands on the route to be taken. The driver, not so politely, said ‘nertz’.

Outside the racecourse, we three mere males alighted, but the large, vocal lady with the tipped-over eye shade refused to budge. ‘Stone the crows,’ moaned the taximan, giving us an anguished look as we left him stranded with—Bea Miles.

Bea was known to sometimes leave a cab after being abused by the driver, bending the passenger door right back on its hinges to show her dissatisfaction. She had a few friends in the taxi business, though, and they were happy to drive her on some legendary journeys. John Beynon took Bea from Sydney to Hobart, Adelaide and the long way to Melbourne through Broken Hill. But Bea’s greatest trip needed two taxi drivers—Beynon and Mrs Sylvia Markham. The two drivers secured the greatest fare of their lives when Bea booked them to drive her to Perth—and back again.

The details of this epic of public transport have become muddied over the years but it seems that Beynon, Markham and Bea left Sydney early in January 1955. They made it to Perth in around seven days of very hot travelling in the age before automobile air conditioning. Bea spent four days there, apparently behaving herself, and then they set off back to Sydney.

Bea was paying one shilling a mile for the trip. That worked out to be around 300 pounds one-way across the Nullarbor. Every 100 miles, Bea handed over a five-pound note to her driver. It all added up to a lot of money at the time.

On the way back, Bea spoke with a journalist in Perth on the telephone from Eucla, explaining the reason for her unusual journey:

Primarily I undertook the trip to collect flowers for the Sydney herbarium but the weather has been so blazing hot—up to 108 dig [degrees] at Madura—I’ve not seen a flower worth collecting along [the] Eyre-highway. However, we are having a lot of fun and the open-air life suits me fine.

The journalist also spoke with Sylvia Markham, who said: ‘I got a bit of a shock when asked to drive across Australia and back, but I’m glad I agreed.’

Sleeping outside each night, as they had on the way, the intrepid three expected to be in Adelaide about 24 January and back in Sydney a few days later. All up, the cab fare for the round trip was 600 pounds.

Bea continued her wayward life. She claimed to have been convicted of various charges 195 times, 100 of them fairly. As she aged, Bea’s antics became evermore irritating and she wore out the already thin welcome she had at places like the Public Library, where she was in the habit of spending the day reading. She was banned from the library in the late 1950s. Old and ill, she was taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor at Randwick in 1964. One of the many colourful quotes attributed to her comes from this period: ‘I have no allergies that I know of, one complex, no delusions, two inhibitions, no neuroses, three phobias, no superstitions and no frustrations.’

Gems like this, together with Bea’s utter irreverence towards authority, the police, the law and respectability in general, made her a folk hero to Sydneysiders. In 1961 her portrait was entered in the Archibald Prize by artist Alex Robertson.

Even at the end, Bea went out in outrageous style. When she died in 1973, her coffin was covered in Australian wildflowers and a jazz band played ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and ‘Advance Australia Fair’.

Bea’s larrikin life has featured in a musical, a poem by Les Murray, and in Kate Grenville’s 1985 novel Lillian’s Story and the subsequent film of the same name. Now mostly forgotten, her legend is kept alive through the occasional media article and in the B Miles Women’s Foundation.

One of Australia’s prominent businessmen was the founder of the airline he characteristically named after himself. Reg Ansett was very much the self-made man. He finished school at fourteen and worked as an axeman in the Northern Territory to earn enough to buy a Studebaker to start a road transport company. This allowed him to buy a Gypsy Moth airplane and in 1938 he started Ansett Airways. He was then just 28 years old. He continued to display his legendary stubbornness and business acumen through the rest of his life, branching into car hire and other mostly successful businesses. He was a colourful character with a considerable public profile in his day, eventually being knighted for his achievements.

Reg Ansett entered Australian folklore in various ways, but particularly in a story often told about him by friend and foe alike:

A young man was keen to make a name for himself in business, just like the then-ageing but incredibly eminent Reg Ansett. The young bloke couldn’t believe his luck when he was in a restaurant for a meeting with an important client and he spotted Reg at a table full of other prominent business people. And obviously settled in for a long session.

Screwing up his courage, he approached the table and nervously addressed the great man, asking for a moment of his time and for a bit of a leg up the slippery ladder of business. Magnanimously, Reg condescended to help out and asked what he could do.

‘Well, Mr Ansett,’ said the young man, ‘I have a very important client coming to lunch with me today. I need to impress this person with my business ideas and also with my contacts. Would you be kind enough to pretend that you know me?’

‘Sure,’ agreed Reg, mildly amused at the effrontery of the young man and probably reminded of his own early days.

‘Thank you so much,’ gushed the young man. ‘When I leave the restaurant with my client I’ll come past your table. Would you be good enough to stand up and greet me as if I were a valued business colleague?’

Reg was a bit taken aback, but he was in a good mood over his latest business deal. ‘Okay, young fella,’ he replied condescendingly, ‘always happy to give a newcomer a helping hand.’

Reg went back to his celebrations and the young man returned to his table to meet his client.

When the meal was over, Reg and his mates were still hard at it. The young man paid the bill and carefully manoeuvered himself and his client to pass right next to Reg’s table. Reg couldn’t miss them and remembered that he had agreed to take part in the harmless deception. He got to his feet and enthusiastically held out his hand to the young man, saying ‘Good to see you again, how’s business?’

The young man stopped, looked coldly at the great man and said, ‘Piss off, Reg, you can see I’m busy.’

An Australian, an Irishman and an Englishman are sitting in a bar. The only other person in the bar is a man.

The three men keep looking at this other man, for he seems terribly familiar. They stare and stare, wondering where they have seen him before, when suddenly the Irishman cries out ‘My God, I know who that man is. It’s Jesus!’

The others look again and, sure enough, it is Jesus himself, sitting alone at a table.

The Irishman calls out, ‘Hey, you!!! Are you Jesus?’

The man looks over at him, smiles a small smile and nods his head. ‘Yes, I am Jesus,’ he says.

The Irishman calls the bartender over and says to him ‘I’d like you to give Jesus over there a pint of Guinness from me.’

So, the bartender pours Jesus a Guinness and takes it over to his table. Jesus looks over, raises his glass, smiles a ‘thank you’ and drinks.

The Englishman then calls out, ‘Errr, excuse me Sir, but would you be Jesus?’

Jesus smiles and says, ‘Yes, I am Jesus.’

The Englishman beckons the bartender and tells him to send over a pint of Newcastle Brown Ale for Jesus, which the bartender duly does. As before, Jesus accepts the drink and smiles over at the men.

Then the Australian calls out, ‘Oi, you! D’ya reckon you’re Jesus, or what?’

Jesus nods and says, ‘Yes, I am Jesus.’

The Australian is mightily impressed and has the bartender send over a stubbie of Victoria Bitter for Jesus, which he accepts with pleasure.

Some time later, after finishing the drinks, Jesus leaves his seat and approaches the three men. He reaches for the hand of the Irishman and shakes it, thanking him for the Guinness. When he lets go, the Irishman gives a cry of amazement, ‘Oh God, the arthritis is gone,’ he says. ‘The arthritis I’ve had for years is gone. It’s a miracle!’

Jesus then shakes the hand of the Englishman, thanking him for the Newcastle Brown Ale. Upon letting go, the Englishman’s eyes widen in shock. ‘By Jove’, he exclaims, ‘the migraine I’ve had for over 40 years is completely gone. It’s a miracle!’

Smiling beatifically, Jesus then approaches the Australian, who has a terrified look on his face. As Jesus reaches for his hand, the Aussie whispers … ‘Piss off mate, I’m on Worker’s Comp!’