Why did we keep moving? I never really understood. I asked my father once, one night in my first university vacation, watching him work in the smithy. He didn’t stop what he was doing. After a while, he said, ‘Never wanted to stop anywhere long after I lost your mum.’ There was a long silence, then he said, ‘Nothin’s forever, John. Enjoy what you can and don’t be scared to move along.’
Before I was in my teens, I could tell when we were going to move. My father became morose, pacing around at night, not fishing, not reading, saying things like: ‘Jesus, imagine endin up in a dump like this.’ Once that started, it was over. Mentally, he was already somewhere else. It only remained for me to tell the teacher and get my sealed envelope. And prepare myself for the fight.
That’s the thing I remember most clearly about the string of tiny towns that looked as if they’d been dumped on the site from the air. The fight in the first week. They trailed you after school like mongrels following a bitch on heat. Big boys, small boys, fat boys, thin boys, all aroused by the prospect of violence, strutting, jostling. You walked on, whole body tense, heart like a piston in your chest, feeling them getting closer, half hearing the taunts through the blood noise in your head. Then someone would try to trip you, usually a small one, over-excited, wide-eyed, flushed. Or a few would run past you, turn and block your path or dawdle along, finally stopping. That was the moment.
By the time I was twelve, I’d learned to short-circuit the process, stop, turn, issue the challenge, draw out some pale-eyed, mouth-breathing boy, spitty lips, hands too big for his wrists. You couldn’t win these fights. Some bigger boy always dragged you off if you got the upper hand. But what my father taught me was that you had to show the whole baying mob that you were a dangerous person, a person prepared to kick, bite, pull hair, tear ears, gouge eyes, squeeze testicles, anything. ‘Don’t worry about fair,’ he said. ‘Dangerous is what you want to be. Go mad. Nobody wants to fight a mad person. Nobody wants fingers stuck up his nose.’
He was right. He also taught me the barfighters’ tricks: the quick chest shoves to get the opponent off balance, the heel scraping down the shin and stamping on the instep, the Adam’s apple punch, the thumbs pressing under the ears, the chop under the nose, the many painful uses of the elbow, the double ear slap, the protruding knuckle in the chestbone. I learned these things and I survived.
Ned Lowey. In all this movement, this rootlessness, this life in shabby houses and scuffed caravan parks and shearers’ quarters that smelled of sweat and ashes, Ned Lowey was the still point. We were on our way to another town, another fight, another departure, when I met him for the first time. It must have been some time after my ninth birthday, but I had been hearing about Ned as far back as I could remember, things like ‘We need bloody Ned Lowey for work like this’, or ‘Here’s a little trick Ned Lowey showed me’, or, at picnic races, ‘Back Ned Lowey ridin sidesaddle against this lot’. We drove into Ned’s backyard and he came out and shook hands with my father. They stood there smiling and slapping each other’s arms.
‘This is the young fella,’ my father said. ‘John. We named him for the wife’s father.’ I remember my surprise at two things. One was that Ned was Aboriginal. My father had never mentioned it. The other was that Ned Lowey was not a giant. I remember that he took me by the shoulders, picked me up and held me to his chest. Then we went into the house to meet his wife. She was sitting in a patch of sun in the kitchen, not doing anything, a gaunt woman with faded blonde hair. I knew without being told that there was something wrong with her.
Ned Lowey. I shook the thoughts away and got up. By seven am, I was in the smithy getting ready to start work on Frank Cullen’s latest contraption. Frank inherited the huge property that had been in his wife’s family, the Pettifers, for generations. That was the end of farming. Now he spent all his time designing strange and usually counterproductive devices. Every six months or so, he came in with a set of plans for another machine that was going to change the face of rural life. The first one I made for him was designed to help elderly farmers mount horses. It featured a hydraulic piston and was said to have enabled the test jockey to mount a tree. The latest one was a sort of tray on wheels that fitted on the back of a ute. By fitting tracks, the tray could be run off the back and loaded. A winch operated by the driver then pulled it back up.
‘Came to me in a flash, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Can’t think why no-one’s ever thought of it.’
‘Takes a special kind of mind,’ I said.
It was almost noon and I had just finished welding the heavy-gauge steel mesh into the angle-iron base when Frank and Jim Caswell arrived. Jim was rumoured to be old man Pettifer’s illegitimate son. Frank was somewhere in his seventies with a big, bony head, patches of hair, exploding eyebrows and ears like baseball mitts. Jim was about fifteen years younger, full head of grey hair cut short, small-featured, neat. He looked like a clerk in some old-fashioned shop. Usually they both wore the squatter’s uniform: tweed jacket, moleskins, blue shirt and tie. Today Jim was in a dark suit, white shirt and navy tie.
They sat down on the bench against the wall and watched me marking the position of the axle mountings. These visits were a feature of the construction period.
‘Nice job so far, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Paying attention to the plans? Worked out in every detail.’
‘Like I was building a Saturn VI,’ I said.
‘Good man.’ He turned to Jim. ‘So who was there?’
‘Langs, Rourkes. Carvers, Veenes, Chamberlain, Charlie Thomson, Ormerods, Caseys, Mrs Radley, Frasers. Just about everyone. Old Scott.’
‘Old Scott?’ Frank said. ‘Danny Wallace hated the miserable old bastard. What did he want?’
‘Same as everyone else, I s’pose. Came to pay his respects.’
‘Anybody ask after me?’
‘No.’
Frank scratched a moulting patch of hair. ‘Not a word? What about old Byrne? He must’ve noticed I wasn’t there.’
‘Didn’t say anything.’
‘Well,’ said Frank. ‘That’s that bloody mob for you. I knew Danny Wallace since ’47, day I king-hit him in the Golden Fleece. Used to put him to bed. That drunk he’d get on a horse backwards.’ He patted his jacket. ‘What happened to my smokes?’
‘I though he was cryin a bit at the end,’ Jim said. ‘By the grave.’
‘Who?’
‘Old Kellaway.’
Frank found his cigarettes and lit one with a big gold lighter. He coughed for a while, then he said. ‘Old Kellaway? Bloody crocodile tears. Sanctimonious old bastard. Spent his whole life crawlin up the cracks of the rich. You know where the bastard was in the war? Y’know?’
‘I know,’ Jim said.
‘Chaplain in the Navy, bloody Australian Navy, two pisspots and a tin bath. Hearin the bunnyboys’ confessions.’ He put on a high voice. ‘ “Forgive me, father, I cracked a fat at Mass.” ’ Then a deep voice: ‘ “My son, the Lord forbids us to lust after petty officers’ bums. Say fifty Hail Marys and, report to my cabin after lights out.” ’
‘He’s all right,’ Jim said. ‘Hasn’t been much of a life for him.’
‘All right?’ said Frank. ‘All right? He’s far from bloody all right. If he was all right he’d never have landed up here so he wouldn’t have much of a life. He’d a been a bloody cardinal, wouldn’t he?’
Frank took a small leather-bound flask out of his inside pocket. ‘Just thinkin about bloody Kellaway gives me a need for drink,’ he said. He took off the cap and had a good swig.
Jim muttered something.
‘What’s that?’ Frank said, wiping his lips. ‘You say somethin?’
‘Nothin.’
‘Don’t bloody nothin me. Somethin to say, spit it out.’
‘Bit early for the piss, innit?’
Frank nodded knowingly. ‘Sonny,’ he said, ‘don’t come the fuckin little prig with me. I’ve had disapproval from a whole family of disapproval experts. I feel like it, I’ll give myself a whisky enema for breakfast.’
I was looking at the plan. ‘What’s this twisty thing you’ve drawn here, Frank?’
He eased himself up and came over. ‘It’s a spring, Mac. A shock absorber.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘That horse mounter needed a shock absorber.’
‘I need a bloody shock absorber,’ Frank said. ‘Shares goin down like the Titanic and the bastards call an election. This country’s buggered, y’know that, Mac. Get butchered for bloody king and country twice, then it’s for the Yanks. Now everythin’s for sale. Power stations. Telephone. Bloody airports. Negative gear this bloody Parliament buildin chock-a-block with liars, thousands of bloody bent police thrown in. Buy the whole country.’
‘What about Crewe?’ I said. ‘Going to get back, is he?’ I went over to the cabinet to look for some suitable springs for the shock absorber.
‘Anthony Crewe,’ Frank said. ‘Lord only knows how they made that bastard attorney-general. Bloody miscarriage of justice if ever there was one. Done that shonky will for old Morrissey.’
‘That’s enough, Frank,’ Jim said.
Frank turned his big head slowly. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What did you say?’
Jim looked away. ‘You know what Mr Petty always said about repeatin gossip.’
A look somewhere between pleasure and pain came over Frank’s face. ‘Little man,’ he said, ‘don’t quote The Great Squatter to me. I’ve told you that before. I had those sayins straight from the horse’s arse for thirty-five years. Now a miniature ghost of the old shit follows me around repeatin them. Is that what they mean by everlastin life? You’re dead but your miserable opinions linger on to haunt the livin?’
He turned back to me. ‘Now, as I was sayin, the bastard Crewe shoulda been in jail over that will.’