10
From Bunnythorpe to Bulls: rural raconteurs and others
Some men of the land are masterful raconteurs. Spinners of yarns as tensile as a merino’s wool. They can draw the tale out and tease it into the corners of the minds of wide-eyed listeners, poised for punch-lines, down-home philosophies, and an easing of the rural burden.
They said of Olly, a sharemilker in the lower North Island, that he was the best teller of tales in the hinterland, district, province even. Perhaps the best bullshit merchant in the North Island – not that Olly’s tales didn’t have a basis in fact. It was just that like a lot of good stories they had been embellished over the years, over the jugs, around the bar leaners and roaring fires, during the ploughman’s lunches of those who had no reason to plough the fields. Those who were not arable at all.
Olly was a regular at a country pub halfway between two rural settlements that barely feature on conventional road maps. It may have been between Bunnythorpe and Bulls, although locals suggested it was much further to the east – or west – depending on who was telling the tale of the tale-teller. It was even suggested that the pub’s purported location – between Bunnythorpe and Bulls – had been mythologised because both towns had decided rural connotations. Bunnythorpe, based on the scourge of bunny-rabbits who ate farms whole, and Bulls, because bulls did what they did on the land. Had there been New Zealand towns called Massey-Ferguson and Cowpat, the pub would probably have been located halfway between them.
Wherever Olly’s raconteuring base was located, it certainly became a lively, well-patronised place. Farmers and other land-based folk flocked to hear his diatribes, which ranged from short, punchy anecdotes to long-winded shaggy-dog stories that dragged on into the night long after the sun had plunged over the Akatarawas.
In later years, age and the beer got to Olly. He began rambling. One story involved the drenching of sheep and an irritated farmer who reacted badly when his drenching gear broke down. As patrons clustered to hear the pithy, thought-provoking punchline, one that would send them home feeling better about life in general – like a good movie that makes you laugh, cry and think, often all at the same time – Olly came up with the following:
‘...and then bloody Charlie, after the bloody drench sprayer broke down, with still a bloody million merinos to go, yelled out, X?&%£$!’
One or two patrons affected an automatic response guffaw, like a bunch of two-tooths, but most slunk back to the bar realising that Olly had lost the plot. The punch lines were now full of expletives, if not expletives alone.
Then Olly really blotted his copybook. One night a smart-arsed young one-tooth challenged his every ramble.
‘Once there was this bloke down in Otorohanga—’
‘Otorohanga’s up, not down,’ the young bounder retorted.
‘This bloke up in Otorohanga set up a bull stud—’
‘Bullshit,’ interjected the young farm worker, his sunglasses angled provocatively atop his head, now that the sun had plummeted and the great outdoors was plunged into darkness.
‘This bugger in Otorohanga set up a bloody bull stud,’ Olly persisted testily, directing his spittle-charged speech at the arrogant one-tooth, who stood like Gary Cooper waiting for a High Noon shout-out, his cellphone poised like a colt .45.
‘And here’s the bloody punch line.’
With a wiry bound, Olly placed himself adjacent to the one-tooth and dropped him to the beer-stained carpet with a left-hook, right-cross combination.
Olly was subsequently barred from the pub, but he reckoned he was leaving anyway. A rich rural raconteuring tradition passed into antiquity.
Some rural pubs are quiet, dour even. Devoid of raconteurs. Farmers tell their wives they are going for a quiet beer at the pig’s trough, and that’s what they usually get. But they often drink a lot of them – quiet beers – and by the time they get back to the wife they probably wish they’d had just a couple of loud beers, if it meant an earlier release and less censure from the wife.
What the Foot and Mouth Hotel lacked in classic raconteurs it made up for, in part, with one or two tricksters who provided in-house entertainment of variable taste and quality. For purists on the lookout for your traditional grunting rural pub barman, the Foot and Mouth held pride of place. In recent years, apparently, the ambience of dour rural pubs has become an acquired tourist taste. Some visitors to our shores actually seek out not the vibrant, friendly watering holes, but the quiet, darkened, dour public bars of rural backwaters where the patrons and staff make up a tableau that resembles something out of Madame Tussauds. ‘Stretch’ the barman glowers down, wordless. His facial features look waxen. Until he is required to pour another ‘quiet beer’, he leans on the bar from a great height and stares into the middle distance, out the pub window, across the highway to the tall hills flecked with sheep and the odd steer.
Strangers entering the bar find their ‘good afternoon’ is met with the classic rural grunt. The sound is, after all, redolent of the stifled bleat of a ram and totally topical and appropriate. Meanwhile, the patrons ape the barman’s posture and verbal skills and the purists and tourists soak up the atmosphere – and the passive smoke of defiant smokers – with suppressed glee.
Decimal currency was a while taking hold here. The outlawing of smoking in drinking establishments is still coming down the wire. A heated debate, consisting of about seven words and involving three locals, raised the scary notion that soon honest, hard-working farmers would not be allowed to drink in pubs. The anti-smacking legislation of recent times, once it seeped through, might ignite a similar seven-word debate, but only inasmuch as it related to the smacking of sheep as they are driven through the race and pens.
It was in the Foot and Mouth that a gun shearer often pulled off his trick of downing an entire jug of DB in one gulp. That in itself was remarkable and produced several quiet smirks. But then, in the coup-de-grace, the gun shearer regurgitated the jug’s contents back into its receptacle and, if anything, the suds were clearer than the original article. The jug even had its head put back on it. The gun shearer’s back would be quietly slapped. Was that illegal? Another complimentary jug was presented to the perpetrator, who had provided so much sheer entertainment to the now quietly smirking patrons – all seven of them.
It was said that the gun shearer with the sword-swallowing reflexes could really hold his grog. His figures were 17 jugs in a six-hour session, which was as impressive as his shearing tally of 300 a day. Seventeen jugs became a record. Mind you, if he was regurgitating for the pleasure of the assembled throng (all the reconstituted beer was flushed down the drain), the amount of beer actually ingested and passed through his kidneys may have rendered his record null and void. A technicality that.
Yet there is always another rural raconteur to step into the breach, and there remain a fund of stories to tell even if they are sometimes based on less traditional aspects of farming. Wayne, a quick-witted type, once told the tale of the prison farm worker who covered his tracks pretty well. While supervising a farm work party of prisoners, Bill, on a day that many judged to be the coldest of the year, sought more heat. The prisoners might have been generating their own as they grubbed thistles, but the supervisor’s role was more sedentary. It was true that Bill had access to a 44-gallon drum with a generous fire of gum wood burning in it, but short of actually climbing into the drum, Bill just couldn’t get warm. Bill also had access to a wooden hut, which provided shelter for the work party should the skies open up. But the hut had no heating. So Bill instructed the prisoners to lift the drum of burning gum with their shovels and carry it into the hut.
That ought to do it, Bill thought. As the hut heated up, he wandered over the brow of the hill to have a chat with the officer in the next block. As the two men generally blew on their hands and flapped their arms and did their best through numb lips and chattering teeth to generate conversation, they became aware of great clouds of black smoke rising from Bill’s block.
The hut was ablaze. Once the drum had been manhandled inside, an inmate had blown on the fire to stop it going out. He achieved his objective but such was the vigour of his blowing, embers ended up lodged in the walls. It didn’t take long for the whole hut to go up.
‘It’s not cold in there now, boss,’ the inmate said to Bill, as the supervisor arrived panting back at his post. The work party were grateful for the extra heat as they warmed their hands over the smouldering remains.
Bill’s brain thawed out. He hatched a plan. Eventually, he instructed his party to dig a series of holes into which the hot ashes were placed and covered. The corrugated iron roof was buried in a shallow grave. The area where the hut used to be was smoothed over. Only the drum remained.
The farm manager, Bill’s boss, appeared five minutes later.
‘You guys must be cold,’ the farm manager said solicitously. ‘Coldest day of the year and you’re out here in the open.’
‘Bloody cold, boss. No two ways about it,’ agreed Bill.
‘Why don’t you use your hut?’ the manager probed.
‘Never had one, boss.’
‘Well we’d better get you one then. Good thing you’ve got a drum.’
Cold weather was the issue again when another storyteller, around a roaring fire and over a couple of stiff drinks, held court.
‘The big freeze of’59 was a humdinger,’ Cedric began, as the current big freeze closed in. ‘The weather was so cold they had to take all the meat out of the freezer, or that’s what these folk thought. They figured their freezer had broken down simply because it couldn’t compete with the minus-something air temperature. There was nothing wrong with the freezer, but that didn’t stop them manhandling all their meat outside and stacking it up at the door. The house looked like a serial killer’s retreat. They thought they were adapting astutely to the combined calamities of a busted freezer and the lowest temperatures on record. In truth they were behaving like idiots, but I guess that’s what a bit of hypothermia can do to the human brain.’
Cedric, having captured an audience, ploughed on.
‘The sky got so cold that birds fell to the ground dead.’
‘You sure?’ probed one old wizened drover. ‘I’ve heard of birds dropping dead in the heat. Not in the cold though.’
‘Well let me put it this way,’ Cedric continued. ‘It was so bloody cold that chooks were frozen to their perches and their eggs were solid ice blocks before they hit the straw.’
The old drover stroked his chin.
‘And I should know. I was there, in a shearer’s hut on Mount Horrible, in the middle of it all. The wind whistled off the mountain and around the hut like a screaming banshee. Ceiling beams groaned and creaked like the earth’s tectonic plates dovetailing.’
‘Any doves fall out of the sky?’ the old drover asked.
‘Two hundred and forty-nine by my count,’ Cedric assured him.
‘Do they get doves up Mount Horrible then?’ The old drover wasn’t allowing Cedric’s yarn to unfold the way Cedric would have liked.
‘Obviously, and I’ll tell you this. The dog’s barking was amplified by the cold, like a thousand fog horns.’
‘So you had a thousand dogs, then?’
‘Had a thousand wethers, sir.’
‘Did they drop out of the sky dead?’
‘No, but something caused the outhouse to go west. It could have been the sheep seeking shelter or the gale that whipped through at a thousand miles an hour.’
‘Close enough to it.’
‘So you’re not entirely sure whether it was the wethers or the weather that took out the long drop.’
Cedric was getting a bit peeved by the old drover’s probing and his cunning use of whether, wethers and weather. Bloody hell, why didn’t he just sit back in front of the roaring fire and appreciate the yarns like the other spellbound (if not slightly drunk) connoisseurs of the raconteur’s art?
‘The dog’s breath condensed and rose into the icy air,’ Cedric continued. ‘It was like smoke from a KA steam engine.’
‘There’s no railway up Mount Horrible.’ The old drover was really riling Cedric now.
‘I’m not saying that, but if there was a railway up Mount Horrible, and if the trains were pulled by KA engines...’
‘Fair enough.’ The old drover seemed to be conceding. Relieved, Cedric ploughed on.
‘I’ll tell you this though. The most ominous sound of all – and you can forget your KA engines – was the horrible, heavy rumbling sound on the roof of the hut. Now that was scary. Sounded like the wethers were on the roof, or the KA engine.’
The old drover nodded, although he still stroked his chin.
‘After stoking up the fire and chucking on our overcoats we ventured outside to see what was making the din. As we stood in the perishing cold we could see that the smoke from the chimney was freezing solid as it hit the air and rolling and tumbling down the roof in chunks as big as hay bales.’
The old drover stopped stroking his chin. He rose to his feet, swaying slightly, drained his glass and addressed the gathering.
‘I know exactly what he’s talking about,’ he slurred. ‘There’s nothing worse than frozen smoke. It can be a killer. It’s bad enough when it rolls down the roof, sounding like a thousand wethers. But when you take a direct hit as it rolls off the roof, it’s just about as bad as being bombed by frozen doves, or rock-like eggs or KA engines.’