Australia's Hidden Heroes

For too long, the story of how Australia was on the winning side in three wars (Boer War and two World Wars) has been hidden, thanks to government suspicion, fear, duplicity and inertia. Australia had two stalwart citizens, whose efforts tipped the balance in favour of the Allies.

One was known as Crooked Mick, a bush hero and strong man who hailed from the Speewah, and this tells of the exploits that he and his companion, a scientist named Henry Cruciform managed to pull off, while surrounded by foreign agents who were, as Mick once said in a candid moment, were "…worse than them Speewah blowflies, the ones that eat crocs".

Here for the first time, readers can learn how Mick and Henry rose to positions of secret prestige and influence, not only in Australia, but across the globe, due in large part to the reports of the foreign spies who gathered close around them, trying to win their secrets. In the world's corridors of power, the two were spoken of in hushed tones.

Here, the reader can learn of Crooked Mick's athletic prowess and how his scratch team of station hands beat the MCC at cricket; how Mick rode four bulls at once; his dog's mathematical skills; how he fought bushfires, floods and droughts; the Speewah girls' snake circus; the world's only Möbius dog; how a British officer at Gallipoli wanted Mick sent off for unsporting behaviour and how Mick sank several German submarines; how Mick sorted the drop bear problem; how Flash Jack drove 400 44-gallon drums from Speewah to the Big Smoke; how Smiling Annie's daughter told the time and other daily events in the Australian bush.

We also meet the many inventions and discoveries of Henry Cruciform, Australia's premier scientist who accidentally blew up Professor Moriarty while working with Sherlock Holmes to perfect the scientist's new explosive, nitrogum. Cruciform also invented radio, X-rays, the transistor and a fiendishly devastating form of psychological warfare.

It was Mick and Cruciform who shot down the Red Baron, and Cruciform acted as a strange attractor, so that during a single picnic lunch in Adelaide, he suggested the titles Forsyte Saga and Heart of Darkness to John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad respectively, as well as suggesting X-ray diffraction to William Bragg, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this very work.

History will never be the same, once these facts are known. Warning: the book contains the shocking truth about Mata Hari's time in Australia, how Professor Moriarty really died, the true genesis of the Boy Scouts, the music of Arnold Schönberg, and who really killed the Red Baron. Readers will need a strong stomach.

This book is hard to put down. I know, because I have already tried poison, flame-throwers, a knife and a squadron of tanks, and STILL the thing lives.

Not to beat about the bush, this is classic Australian yarn-spinning, coming from the only Australian author who is a trained con man who never went over to the dark side.

See a sample here

An ebook in full colour for Kindle $5.45

and a print-on-demand paperback, $25

The base page for all of these is here.

Crooked Mick goes to war

This marks a turn-around, because Stewart the Sandgroper nudged me at just the right time, so I pulled this (and the other 85,000 words that go with it) off the back burner, and I am now pitching it to publishers. Remember, this is part of something far bigger.

My mate, Baron Munchausen, asked me why there were no women in the story, and I assured him that there were women on the Speeewah. He says I have to prove it, so I told him about Smiling Annie's Snake Circus.

This tale, apparently written by a thumbnail dipped in tar, was in among Cruciform’s papers, stuck to the bottom of one of the tin boxes. It is in plain English, but clearly escaped the eyes of the security people who vetted the papers. This single plain English account confirms what Cruciform’s coded notebooks tell us, that Mick and Cruciform were working together during the war.

Crooked Mick was quite old when World War I broke out, so he had to dye his hair in order to join up. He joined the Light Horse, but kept on breaking the horses he was given, and the army wouldn’t let him bring in his own horse. He even broke a few heavy horses they let him try, but he was so strong, they asked him to be their farrier, and he agreed, knowing that once he got to the front he could do some good.

When the Brass decided to send the Light Horse to invade Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, the lads had to leave their horses behind, so Mick should have stayed in Egypt with the horses, but he hid in the hold until it was too late to send him back. Then when two of the motorboats that were supposed to tow the troops to shore broke down, Mick jumped into the water and swam to the beach, towing five longboats.

That was how he came to be one of the first ashore when the ANZAC troops landed. Once across the beach, Mick set to work digging trenches and tunnelling under the enemy’s trenches, but unfortunately, he was soon being given orders by an English officer who wasn’t very bright.

“Dig there”, the Pommy would say, pointing at the ground, and Mick would take off in a tunnel going north, never stopping to question the order he was given. You can still see some of these tunnels: they went under the enemy lines and mostly came out on the opposite shore of the peninsula. If the Poms had paid attention, they could’ve gone through those tunnels and attacked the enemy from the rear.

After a while, Mick realised that this digging wasn’t achieving anything, so he started doing things his mates thought might be useful for the war effort. One of his best tricks was throwing dead donkeys with devastating accuracy at the Turkish officers, in their bunkers, half a mile behind the lines.

The result was that their high command promptly told the Turkish soldiers to stop shooting at Simpson and his donkeys, because every dead donkey was being used to wipe out some of the Top Brass. After that time, it was only those Turks who hated officers who fired at Simpson’s donkeys.

Mick dug most of the trenches for our blokes, and chucked all his spoil into the Turks’ trenches for good measure, which got the Turks really cranky, and then he found out about jam tin bombs. That got the Turks seriously upset, because Mick could throw further than they could, and he used all his cricketing skills to drop them into a trench every time. These jam tins had a fuse, the explosive out of twenty bullets, and any old scrap iron or rocks that came to hand. Somebody told me he also used nitrogum, and that we’re not supposed to mention that, but I will.

Mick might have won the war for us, if he’d been allowed, but the Poms kept being stupid. The Turks brought in this big field piece, just to try and get him, and Mick and his mates had no ammo left, as they’d used it all to make jam tin bombs. All they had was a pile of lead bullets from the cartridges. So Mick opens fire with those, against the field gun.

I know, of course, you can’t shoot bits of lead. You need the stuff that goes bang, and that was all used up, but Mick wasn’t shooting the bullets, he was throwing them.

Now you might say that still wouldn’t do much against a field gun, but that’s if you fight fair, as the Poms call it. Mick was belting the bullets down the barrel of that field gun so hard that they wedged at the far end. That made a sort of blockage so the next time the Turks fired the gun, it jammed the round in the barrel and the gun blew up. Our blokes thought it was a great joke, and started collecting more ammo so Mick could spike the other guns. That was when the Poms bought into it.

Some Pommy brass hat said Mick’s activities were unsporting, because the guns were sitting targets. Anyhow, one of our blokes decked him, and Mick said he’d better stop then and there, or some of the diggers’d get into trouble. So Mick dug through quietly into the Turks’ trenches and dumped the unconscious officer there, then backfilled the tunnel, but the Turks were fussy.

A discerning Turkish soldier called Mehmet thought this was no better than littering, and he brought the officer back across No Man’s Land and dropped him on our side. The Turks thought this was so funny, they erected a statue to commemorate it, but in the 1950s, there was nearly a diplomatic incident, and with the help of Lord Casey, they made up a cover story. Don’t believe it.

The Respect to Mehmetçik Memorial (Turkish: Mehmetçiğe Saygı Anıtı).

The officer was never the same again, but Mick’s company named him Puddles, and kept him as a pet. Some people reckon he later became Jacko the Hatter, on the Speewah, but Jacko seems to be a bit brighter than that officer.

One of Mick’s tunnels was later filled with explosives. There was this Australian scientist bloke called Henry Cruciform, who had made this top-secret explosive out of eucalyptus oil, called nitrogum, and they put barrels and barrels of the stuff into Mick’s tunnel, then backfilled the hole with rocks and stuff.

Once it was ready, they lit a long fuse, and went a long way back. The idea was that the explosion would cave in the Turkish trenches, but the tunnel had gone too deep into solid rock. Instead, all of the rocks that were packed into the hole got blasted out of the tunnel, and went heading off through the stratosphere in the direction of France.

Now there are lots of people who claim they shot down the Red Baron, but if you check the official histories, you will see that Manfred von Richthofen was shot down just an hour after they set off the charge in Mick’s tunnel. What’s more, if you look at the available pictures of the Red Baron’s plane, and examine the wreckage carefully, you can see jagged tears going down through the plane from above: it was Mick’s tunnel, powered by nitrogum and working like a giant gun, that really shot the Red Baron down.

Mick’s time there ended when he drove another tunnel back to the landing beach, so the Anzacs could carry food and ammunition up in safety. Just as he was about to break through the rock at the beach end, he tapped into a spring, and got soaking wet, which washed the dye out of his hair, and he stepped out into the sun with all the dye running out of his rapidly whitening hair.

The brass hats were embarrassed, and they had him sent back home so they could avoid admitting that an old man had been winning the war for them. They used the feeble excuse that he had been eating the rations for five companies — which shows how bad their accounting was, as Mick used to eat that much before he sat down to breakfast.

So in the end, Crooked Mick spent the rest of the war helping this Henry Cruciform bloke, the man who had invented the nitrogum, who was working on forms of psychological warfare. But that was after he got back to Australia: on the way home, Crooked Mick refused to give up fighting.

First there was the German torpedo that was heading for the hospital ship he was travelling on, as they were sailing across the Indian Ocean. Mick saw this torpedo coming and dived into the water, trying to stop it. He was feeling a bit weakened as he was only getting rations for five men, and he was pushed backwards by the torpedo, towards the ship.

I forgot to mention that Mick’s dog had been with him, right through the Gallipoli campaign, and had personally captured twenty Turks before the Poms interfered. They reckoned it was unsporting to point your dog at the enemy trenches and say “Fetch!”. Anyhow, Mick’s dog was there, and he jumps in to help, and between them, they flipped the torpedo over, just as it was about to hit the ship, and it went back to the German submarine, sinking it.

Well Mick was hauled back on deck, and his dog too, and the officers said they’d pretend they hadn’t seen the dog, and that Mick might even get a medal for his brave deed, but that he shouldn’t go diving in the water any more. The next day, though, there was another torpedo, and this time, Mick picked up a lifeboat, and threw it at the torpedo, destroying it. He was about to wipe out the submarine with a second smaller life boat, but he was told to stop, and the submarine got away.

The day after that, it was back again, following the ship with just its periscope showing, so Mick went down to the engine room and borrowed a few spare bits of ironmongery and chucked them at the periscope. He missed the first two throws, but the third shot was with a fly wheel that had a crack in it, and he threw it like a discus.

The fly wheel skipped over the surface and ripped off the periscope, which left a big hole that flooded the submarine and forcing it to the surface, where it was captured by the frigate that was convoying them. Mick was treated like a hero, and given a free run of the galley, which is what they call a kitchen on a ship.

They were close to Fremantle in Western Australia when a third submarine tried to have a go at sinking them, and strictly against orders, Mick dived in once more, pulled faces down the periscope, which made them surface to see what was wrong, and then he threw all of the crew overboard, ripped four plates off the hull to sink the submarine, and swam back to the ship, leaving his dog to round up the prisoners and bring them in.

He might have got away with disobeying orders, but the ship was still going full ahead when he caught up with her, and as he approached the stern, his head came in contact with the ship’s screw, which shattered, leaving the ship stranded off the coast with no form of propulsion. “There’ll be no more going into the galley for you, you one-man galley plunderer!” bristled the captain, who had just realised that not only were they stranded, but that Mick had eaten just about all the food. Anyhow, Mick just grinned, and said that was the answer.

He went down to the engine room, kicked one of the riveted steel plates off each of the ship’s sides, and used two oars, made from the lengths of steel rail the ship was carrying as deck cargo, lashed on the steel plates to make oars and rowed the ship in against the tide.

So in the end, the captain agreed to let bygones be bygones, and they hushed the whole matter up, so Mick wouldn’t get into trouble for disobeying orders. Mind you, they say that scientist bloke Cruciform was on board, and he used his influence to make sure Mick’s name was kept out of the papers by telling Billy Hughes to send out a D notice.

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This story and the related ones all have the tag Crooked Mick on them. Use that to find the rest.

The Great Speewah Laziness Contest

Right: about the working dogs of the Speewah.  It's funny, you know, the way that dogs get like their owners, or maybe it's the other way around, since intelligent dogs always seem to be around intelligent owners, but sometimes it goes too far.  Take Lazy Harry: he was even lazier than his dog, or so some people said: I reckon it was touch and go.  As soon as you saw Harry and his dog walking somewhere, you'd twig straight away that if they went any slower they'd be walking backwards.  Harry could shear all right, but in everything else, he was slower than watching grass grow in a drought.

He was working down the Big Smoke at one stage, getting sheep from the rail siding to the abattoir, but he kept getting later and later each day.  The boss got stuck into him, but Harry had the answer: "I can't wake me dog up", he says.  The boss sacked him in the end, but he never could work out whether Harry was lazy or stupid.  We knew, though: he really earned his name.

One time, I seen a tiger snake, and I yells "There's a tiger snake, beside your foot," expecting him to jump out of the way rather fast. But Harry just turns slowly and asks "Which foot?"  That's how lazy Harry was.  And he was standing leaning on a post once, on the Bandywallop road, when a bloke asks him which is the way to Bandywallop.  "Question's too hard," says Harry.

Well the bloke offers him the price of a beer for the information, so Harry tells him the way to go, and the bloke offers him the money.  "Just slip it in me pocket, will yer?" says Harry.

He was tough, though.  Had to be, to go with his laziness, and clever as well.  I remember once I pointed out to him that the thing he was using as a pillow was a steel drainpipe, and I suggested to him that it might not be too comfortable.  "No worries," he told me.  "She'll be sweet — I've got it stuffed with straw."  But he was still lazy, and that brings me to this laziness competition they had one Sunday on the old Speewah station.  Everybody who entered had an hour to get an apple from the other side of the stockyard and eat it, all in the laziest way possible.  Well, Lazy Harry felt he was honour-bound to take out the prize, but he was up against a mean field.

First, there was this big hairy Scotsman, who sort of sauntered across, got to the apple in about 45 minutes, then lay down in some nearby shade, and slowly ate the apple, finishing right on the bell.  The crowd went wild at this, and thought he'd take the prize, but then there was this Irishman up next.

He walked calmly across to the apple, getting to it after just one minute, and gulped it down.  People reckoned he had to be mad, but the next thing he did was to lie down in the same spot, which was out in the sun, and snooze for the next fifty eight minutes, so he got points for being too lazy to move into the shade, and he'd had a good long rest.

Then came this Englishman, who lay down near the start, in the shade, rested for fifty nine minutes, then sprinted for the apple, opened his mouth, and crammed the whole lot in, just as the bell went.  So he got points for a fifty nine minute rest, for staying in the shade, and he looked like a certain winner.  Nobody could beat that, but Lazy Harry was looking quietly confident.

Harry walked up to the start line, and said to the boss, who was acting as umpire: "What do I have to do to win this competition?"  The boss assumes Harry was asleep before, and so he patiently explains the rules, about the time limit, getting to the apple and eating it, and doing it in a lazier way than all the others.

Lazy Harry shrugs his shoulders and wanders off, saying "Blow that for a joke.  It's too much like hard work!", and the crowd goes wild with rage, especially the ones that had put their money on Lazy Harry to win.  Harry ignores all that and flops down in the shade.

Then over all the fuss and bother, Crooked Mick's voice comes loud and clear: "If Harry's too lazy to even pick up the apple, then he just has to be the winner, eh boss?"  Well the boss thought about this for a moment, and then realised that as you'd expect, nobody else had come anywhere near being as lazy as Lazy Harry.  Except maybe his dog, and the dog couldn't stand eating apples, so he wouldn't enter.  He was lazy, but he was smart that dog.  If he'd set his mind to it, he could've won, easy, but he knew how much mental effort he'd have to put in.


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Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Crooked Mick's dog and the locusts

Somebody asked me in an unbelieving tone the other day about Crooked Mick's dog, the one that could round up a swarm of plague locusts, and drive them through a small camp fire.  Now don't get me wrong: I didn't say that Mick's was the only dog that did this, but it was more efficient at it than most dogs.

You see, a plague swarm is usually a few miles (let's say 5 kilometres in your terms) wide, and many of the swarm are well out of the reach of even the best jumping dog, as they fly up to a mile above the earth — call it about 1.5 km.  Narrowing the swarm's front is easy, but getting the high fliers down low enough is always a problem.  The important point is that Mick's dog got around this difficulty in a new and rather creative way.  He was dead lazy, as everybody knows, but Mick's dog was quite good at solving unusual problems.

Plague locusts will always settle on anything green, and Mick's dog had somehow worked out or noticed that male blowflies on the Speewah are green.  So what he used to do was to round up all the blowflies (something any Speewah pup could do) and then cut out the males into a compact mass.  Driving this mass of male blowflies under the swarm of locusts, the dog would then have to lead the locusts back to where the campfire was lit.

Then came the really hard part.  To keep the locust swarm moving down, the dog needed a compact swarm of male blowies, and that meant keeping the blowies in one group while driving the locusts through the flames, so their wings were singed, and they dropped to the ground to die. 

That wasn't hard: even my dog could do that on a good day, but the hard part was that the smell of dead and dying locusts brought all the female blowies around, and keeping them out of the way, and controlling the male blowies, AND driving the locusts through the flames, but not so close that they put the fire out, and gathering enough wood to keep the fire going at the same time, that was pretty hard.

So as I said before, Crooked Mick had a pretty good dog there.  In fact, if we had a few more like him today, we could use a lot less chemical spray than we do.  Which reminds me: Mick's dog also had a good way of dealing with the Speewah mosquitoes.  Now this really was amazing, because the dog was born in the middle of a small drought, and so he was eight years old before he saw his first mosquito.

Yeah, that's a small drought as they come and go on the Speewah.  When it rained after a real Speewah drought, one of Mick's mates fainted at the shock of water on his face, and they had to throw three buckets of dust over him to bring him round.

Anyhow, the mosquitoes came when the drought broke, and like everything else on the Speewah, they're big.  They don't whine, they go FLAP!  FLAP!  FLAP!  It's just as well they aren't around in the times of drought, or they'd blow all the dust away to New Zealand.

Well, Mick's dog didn't hesitate.  As the first mosquito flew over, the dog sized the situation up, and jumped, taking a lump out of the mosquito's proboscis, the giant stinger thing on the front end of the mosquito.  Hardly letting go, he slipped to a new spot on the stinger, and bit again, as the mosquito flew on.

Finally, the dog had chewed all the way around, and the proboscis fell to the paddock below, where it speared into the ground.  The mosquito was now unbalanced, and it spiralled down to the ground, close to its stinger, and wandered off, looking dazed.  As the mosquito landed, the dog let go, stepped safely onto terra firma, then turned around and looked for the next victim.

It took him a week, and by the end of that week, the female mosquitoes were all unspiked, and the whole of the Speewah home paddock was full of proboscises, all stuck in the ground.  Later, when the floods came, the proboscises all filled with water, which made them really useful in the drought that came after that.  All you had to do was chop a wedge into the side, and hold a billy underneath to catch the water flowing out.

But don't get me wrong: other dogs could probably have done the same thing, but I doubt they would have worked it out quite so quickly.

* * * * *

Somebody told me the other day that Crooked Mick's dog couldn't have seen that the male blowflies on the Speewah are green, because dogs are all colour-blind, but that is a false assumption.  You see, the dogs on the Speewah are all kelpies, brought out to Australia from Scotland, and the kelpies have a dash of seal in their pedigree, and seals can see colours quite well.

In any case, as I mentioned before, the dog was born in the middle of a drought, so until he was eight years old, he never saw anything green.  So not being used to green things, he immediately saw the colour when it appeared.

So you have to face it: there's no sense in underestimating the brainpower of a Speewah dog.  Although Mick's dog did have one failing: it could set up a camp fire, fill the billy at the nearest water hole, and put it on the fire, but unless you gave it matches, there was just no way it could light the fire.  And not just any old matches: it had to be given safety matches, and quite often it used three or four of them.

Nobody could ever work out why: the dog was completely normal in every other way, but it just couldn't handle that one simple task.  Probably it got upset by somebody asserting within its hearing that it was colour-blind.  Or maybe it was just that the dog was lazy.  That was its real failing, laziness.

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Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I have been pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

The Speewah dingoes

The dingoes out on the Speewah are smart, as well, but that's probably because they stole away a few of the Speewah dogs, seeing how clever the dingoes are these days.  Anyhow, that's my theory.  I mean, they won't take a bait however hard you try, and they seem to have a special sense that tells them when somebody's tracking them.

If you see one that knows it's being tracked, you can tell straight away, because it walks around backwards.  So all the good trackers know this, and always follow the tracks in the wrong direction.  But like I say, them dingoes are smart, and I reckon any day now, the dingoes will change around, and start going forward when they know they're being tracked.

They're big, the Speewah dingoes, and that's another reason why people think they're carrying some blood from the Speewah dogs, but it might just be the Speewah soil that helps them grow so big and healthy.  But being big, they need a lot to eat, and so while they'd eat a dozen or so sheep at a sitting, and one year, they'd started carrying away cattle, and so it was time to do something about them.

Now while these dingoes are smart, they're not as smart as the Speewah dogs, which can count to about a hundred.  A dingo, if it sees sixteen men go into a hut, and fifteen come out, is usually going to think the hut is empty, so you can get a few that way.  You send a crowd in, leave a few behind, and the rest go away, leaving a tempting little bunch of food behind to bring them in. 

Anyhow, that was the boss said that year, so he got a gang from the shearing shed together, and had us all walk down to a hut that Mick'd put together during his tea break the previous day, and the boss and three of his mates, all crack shots, stayed in the hut while everybody else walked away, all milling around and skylarking to make it harder for the dingoes to count them.  Then Mick came down with half a dozen rams under his arm, and popped them into a pen outside the hut, and walked away again.

It was coming up to a full moon that night, and the Speewah dingoes like to feed at a full moon.  More importantly, even though they would sneak through the shadows, the moonlight lit up their eyes and made them look like small lanterns.  I think they shine their eye light on the sheep and hold them with it.  Anyhow, the boss and his mates were all crack shots.  In fact, it was the same bunch that backed up Crooked Mick when he tackled the drop bears, and they reckoned they'd get a few dingoes by waiting for the glow, and then shooting between the eyes.

There were four of them lying in wait, and they all had repeating rifles, so they got six dingoes the first night, all smack between the eyes, before the rest realised what was happening and took off.  Next morning, Mick hauled them off and burnt the bodies, and the next night, they figured it was worth trying a second time.  Mick told the boss it'd be no good, that the dingoes'd have it all worked out, but the boss still reckoned it was worth a try.

So we all went down to the hut, same as the day before, but there were dingo trails all round the hut, and when we went in, the four rifles were gone, and so were the rams.  There were no two ways about it: the dingoes had taken the four guns when they came back later for a feed.  Well after a bit of discussion, everyone agreed there was no way the dingoes could shoot — or if they could shoot, they wouldn't know how to adjust for wind and range, so the shooters ought to be safe.  So the whole mob of us moved off again, and the shooters got four more rifles, we all went back to the hut again, and left the boss and his mates there again.

It was almost full moon that night, so the shooting ought to be good, they reckoned, but when the dingoes came, they opened fire, and nothing happened.  Then a cloud passed over the moon, there was a quick howl, a few sheepish noises, and when the moon came out again, there were no dingoes and no rams.  They blamed the new rifles, but when they tested them next day, there was no problem with the sights, so they decided they'd all been too nervous about dingoes shooting back, which they now agreed was quite silly.

But the next night, the same thing happened again, so the boss sent Mick out to work out what was going on.  He came back grinning, and took the boss out to look at the tracks, exactly where the boss and his mates had seen the dingoes coming in.  "There's your problem," he said.

The boss looked, and saw just one set of prints, just where his target had been.  "What's the problem then, Mick?" he asked.

Mick pointed to the prints.  "You need to shoot just outside of the pair of eyes, not between them," he said.  Then he explained the tracks, which had left paws on the right, and right paws on the left.  The dogs had come in as pairs, each using the two inside legs on each dog, and with their outside eye closed, so when the boss and his mates put a bullet between the two eyes they could see, the bullet went into empty space.

That night was the last really full moon night, and it didn't come up until late, but the boss and his mates were ready, and they got four pairs of dingoes and a couple of single ones as well, and that either wiped them out or they moved away.  But it's lucky there wasn't more of the Speewah dog intelligence in them, or they'd be taking the Speewah sheep still.


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Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Why Crooked Mick's dog seems stupid

For some reason, people seem a little puzzled about Crooked Mick's dog.  I keep having to point out that it wasn't really what you might call a clever dog, in fact it was generally regarded as the silliest dog on the Speewah, especially when you consider its size.  And it was lazy, too.

More than one New Chum had to be advised against trying to saddle Crooked Mick's dog after some wag had asked them to do just that.  Not that anybody cared about the New Chums all that much, but people of sensitivity could see how appallingly embarrassed the dog became, since all the saddles were too small for it.  Excepting for Mick's horse's saddle, but no New Chum could even lift that, and the dog wouldn't've helped them either.  Too embarrassed, you see . . .

The dog's main intellectual limitation was, as I've mentioned before, in its total inability to light a fire unless you gave it matches, and they had to be safety matches at that.  But in spite of that, I'm inclined to think Mick's dog was brighter than people thought.

I came to this conclusion after one occasion on which I saw the dog sit, wag its tail for a bit in an odd way, get up, turn round, look at the ground, turn back, wag again, and so on.  Curious, I wandered over to have a look.  There in the dust was a textbook example of the diagram that always illustrates Pythagoras' theorem.  Well, almost textbook: I'd say that the right angle was about 3 degrees off, but the squares on the three sides were all very good indeed.

The dog spent about half an hour fiddling with it, but it never seemed to get that right angle any closer, and in the end it mooched off.  So I think that all the time people were laughing at the dog for being stupid, it was just being absent-minded.

Which is no excuse, really, because a working dog has to keep its mind on the task in hand, and that was where Crooked Mick's dog fell down.  I mean, take the time it had to boil the billy for Mick out on the edge of the Grassy Paddock on the Speewah.  There were no trees for miles, not even little shrubs, so the standard method was to light a grass fire, and run along holding the billy over the flames.

Well Mick's dog had the matches that day, so it got the water, started the fire without any problems, and ran along until the billy was boiled, but like I say, it was absent-minded.  When the billy boiled, the dog was five miles away, but it had gone and left the tea behind!

Maybe the dog had its mind on Fermat's Last Theorem or maybe it was dreaming of something new to do with Napier's bones, or perhaps it was the four-colour map theorem, which the dog solved, many years ago, by rounding up a number of geographers and eating all their coloured pencils, but that's another story.  And in any case, who needs a dog that can do original mathematics?

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Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Crooked Mick fails to fight

I never got around to mentioning this, but Crooked Mick came down to the Big Smoke once.  He wasn't there long, though, before he got himself into trouble.  There was this bloke in town, claimed to be the world heavyweight champion of the world.  Well as you might guess, with two big men in the same town, the inevitable happened, and Mick wandered into a room in a fancy hotel, where this champion was holding court and showing off.  Mick just stood there quietly, watching while the champion bent a steel bar into a U-shape.  It was quite a thick bar, and the champion made quite a fuss about how hard the job was.

Then to prove how strong he was, he bent two more, even thicker, bars in the same way, and passed them around.  Two men took hold of the thinnest bar and tried to straighten it again, but they couldn't.  Then while everybody was still crowding around to look at the bars, the bloke moved over to two huge iron barbells, and a pile of spare weights.  Calling for their attention, he lifted first one weight, and then the other.  He was about to start adding extra weights, but he stopped, because there was a fuss going on in the background, and nobody seemed to be paying him much attention.

What had happened was that Crooked Mick had been looking at the three iron bars on the floor, and being a tidy sort of bloke, he picked them up to put them on a table.  Before he put them down, and without really thinking about it, he had bent them all straight again.  That would have been acceptable, but Mick had straightened all three at the one time, and the heavyweight champion of the world got really mad about this.  You could see he was really seething with anger, under the surface, and he was muttering something real nasty.

Anyhow, he tried not to let it show that he was angry, but I was there, and he said, all sarcastic like, "I suppose you'd like to try lifting these weights as well?".

Well Mick said nothing but walked over, and looked at the two barbells on the floor.  Everybody crowded around, and Mick looked at the weights, then says, "Most of you couldn't see me here, so hang on, and I'll move over near the door."

And with that, he picks up one barbell, tucks it under his arm, then slips his little finger around the second one, getting the balance just right and then scoops up all but one of the spare weights in his other hand, and starts to saunter across to a better spot.  "I'll come back for the other one," he says, "it's better not to strain yourself with stuff like this!"

Now I can see what you must be thinking: them weights were fakes, but it wasn't so: they were the real thing all right, because when he stopped in one place, the floor collapsed under Crooked Mick.  He plummeted down three floors, we found out later, but before we could all race out to see what had happened to him, he comes back up the stairs, still carrying the weights and the barbells.

Well that was too much for the champion.  He grabs a white glove from his pocket and steps forward, slapping Mick on the face with it.  "We will fight a duel!" he shouts.  "You will choose the weapons!"

Flash Jack was there, and so he takes Mick to one side and explains to him about the etiquette of duelling, and how the challenged person has choice of weapons, and how you always fight at dawn.  Crooked Mick stood there thinking for a moment, then says, "Righto.  I choose to fight with axes."

"I don't have an axe!" says the champion, starting to look worried.

"No worries, sport!" says Mick.  "I use two most of the time, so I'll bring 'em both, one for each of us.  See yer tomorrow!"

We never did though, even though we turned up at the park on time, with the axes.  In fact, we never saw the heavyweight champion of the world at all after that, and Mick went back to the Speewah the very next day, mumbling something about city folk being too rough for the likes of him.

In spite of what some people say, he was a very gentle bloke at heart, and I don't know what he would've done if the heavyweight champion of the world had tried to take him on.  As far as I know, Mick only ever fought one fight, and he lost that.

So when you hear people saying Mick'd rather have a fight than a feed, I reckon they're having a lend of you.


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Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I have more or less given up on pitching to publishers, so they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Crooked Mick goes fishing

I said I was going to tell you about how Crooked Mick broke the world rod-casting championships, and I will, provided you can stop interrupting me with your questions.  Is that too much to ask?  Right, here goes.

Mick was really keen on fishing.  It all started when there was this Murray Cod that'd got up onto the Speewah in a flood and settled down to breed.  Well whatever was in the Speewah soil, it must have been in the water, and worked for these cod as well, because they grew to a size to match anything else that the Speewah could produce.

The whole shearing shed were getting tired of sheep, they said.  It was bad enough having to shear the blanky things, they said, but why did they have to eat them as well?  The station manager said if they wanted anything else, they'd have to catch it for themselves.  So Crooked Mick decided to catch one of the cod.

Well every line he tried just snapped, as soon as the bait was taken, and when he tried a chain, the hooks just got bitten through.  When he used case-hardened hooks, the cod just pulled and bent them out straight.  So naturally, Mick went for bigger and tougher hooks, and that was when the chains started snapping again.

The rest of the shearers laughed, and that made Mick more stubborn than ever, and he went out to the back shed mumbling, and carrying several hundredweight of chain wrapped around his left arm, and a couple of larger bits as well.

All you could hear after work for the next three nights was hammering, clanging, and frequent swearing.  Mick didn't have a bellows for the forge, and his dog had to heat the fire by panting, and it kept stopping for a drink, which didn't help Mick any at all, but I've told you before about how lazy that dog was.

Just as a side issue: if Mick'd kept an eye out, he could have had the cod there and then, because when that dog drank, it cleared a two-mile stretch of the river for five to ten minutes, leaving all the fish flapping on the mud till more water flowed down.  Still, Mick was single-minded, and only looked up to swear at the dog and to tell it to get back to panting, or sometimes to slow down the panting because it was blowing the fire out.  Like I said, the dog was a bit short on commonsense.

At the end of the three nights, Mick had finished a fishing rig that no cod could ever break.  It was so heavy, in fact, that Crooked Mick and his dog couldn't carry it by themselves, and so Mick had to whistle up two of the other station dogs to help.  Between Mick and the dogs, they dragged the gear down to the river, trampling over a young and rather silly ram that got in the way, so Mick grabbed that and used it as bait, spiking it on this huge anchor-like hook he had fashioned.

Some of the other shearers reckoned Mick had gone a bit mad, and that he was going to wait till the cod came up and brain it with this anchor, but Crooked Mick knew better than that.  Them cods had brains, he'd tell you, and wouldn't be fooled that easy.  Instead, he attached the gear to a gum tree that was so big all the Speewah dogs could use it at the same time, wrapped the chain three times round, and threw the hook into the river, making a splash and a wave that would smash up four freight steamers two days later, and three hundred miles downstream.  Then he sat back to wait.

He didn't have to wait long, as the fish soon snapped onto the bait and pulled back.  Mick grabbed the end of the "line", and held on with a grim determination.  Nothing gave way, so the fish pulled harder, and now it was firmly hooked.  "The die is cast!" cried Mick, who had been given the rudiments of a classical education while they waited two and a half years for the rain to stop, one wet season.

"The die is cast!" he cried again, in case anybody had missed it the first time.  (Mick really was quite vain about his education at times. Even when it was silly: I mean it was the rod or the bait that was cast, and that was a while back.)  Then the fish pulled again, and Mick was almost pulled off his feet.  After that, it was on for young and old.

The fish pulled, Mick pulled, and the gum tree just sat there in the middle.  Then all of a sudden, the whole trunk snapped through, and this time Mick did go over, but he never got wet.  He gripped the stump with his legs, and pulled.  And he pulled, and he pulled.

He pulled with all his strength, all through that night, but when it came time for breakfast the next day, he was no closer to pulling that fish in, and he had to let go, and get back to work.

This caught the fish by surprise, and it flew across the river, up the bank, and skidded, flapping all the while, half a mile across the plain on the other side, where they sliced it up with cross-cut saws that afternoon, and the whole shed lived on fish for a week, until it started to go off, and a crow got the rest of it.

There was just one problem of course, and that was that all the pulling had dragged the bed of the river two miles from where it used to flow, but the boss didn't mind, because three paddocks that used to be dry now had river frontages, and they used the bones of the fish later on, and built a ten-room hut over them.

Didn't last, though, because those cod are tough.  Next time a flood came through, the bones just up and swam away.  So if you ever catch a really big cod with corrugated iron right down its back on both sides, that'll be the one.  Anyhow, that was how Mick got the fishing bug that led to him setting a world record for rod-casting, but I'd better leave that story till some other time.

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Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

The first Sydney Harbour tunnel

Crooked Mick decided one year the drought had gone on just a bit too long.  It really was a bad dry spell, even for the Speewah.  First, the trees had started following Mick's dog around, and then even the mirages had dried up, so Mick headed down to Sydney to see what work he could pick up, and Flash Jack and Lazy Harry came with him.  Times were tough everywhere, and they talked on the way about what they would do.

Lazy Harry reckoned he'd heard there was money to be got from holding up a bank, but then Mick pointed out that most of them weren't falling over, so Harry had to think again.  In the end, Harry and Flash Jack opened up their own outdoors barber service, down at Circular Quay.  All they needed was a box for the customers to sit on and their shears, they reckoned.

The trouble was that even city slickers knew a bit about shearing, and they smelled a rat when they saw the tar pot behind the box, ready to be used on any cuts and nicks.  Then again, anybody who saw how they grabbed their customers and held them would be unlikely to line up for a trim, and the word soon spread — "The Mad Barbers" one newspaper called them.  Well the upshot was their business was poor, and they ended up going back to the Speewah, leaving Mick behind in the Big Smoke.

Mind you, I think what really got them going was when this rough bloke from the Rocks came down and said he wanted a good shave and fast.  Looking carefully at the tar-pot, he produced a large pistol, and sat with it in his lap as they put the drop sheet around him, a habit they picked up after the first week, though it didn't work on the sheep at all, the next year when they went back shearing.  Anyhow, this rough bloke settles himself in then gives Flash Jack the eye.

"If you blokes so much as nick me," he says, "I'll shoot you both dead."

"I'm sorry sir," says Flash Jack.  "We don't need your business."

"You do if you don't want to start leaking from holes in your chest," the rough bloke growls, and that makes it final.

Well Flash Jack got the shakes, but Lazy Harry steps in, strops the old cut-throat razor to perfection, lathers him up, shaves him down without so much as a nick.  Standing up and paying, the rough bloke says "That got you going didn't it?  Reckoned your last hour'd come, eh?"

Lazy Harry wipes the razor clean on an old towel.  "No," he says.  "If I'd nicked you, I would have slashed your throat on the next stroke," calm as you like.  But that afternoon, the two of them cleared off for the bush before any more rough blokes could come out of the Rocks for a shave, leaving Mick in the city, all by himself.

Anyhow, there was an election coming on, and the government decided to promise a tunnel under the harbour.  They even went through the act of calling for tenders.  All the big companies were in on the joke, and turned in the quotes their mates the politicians wanted.  They were in a no-lose position, because they all asked for squillions to do the job.  This saved their mates the politicians from having to really build a tunnel, but if something went wrong and somebody got given a contract, they'd make squillions and squillions, because there was this double entry system of accounting that they all used.

Well Mick didn't wake up to what was going on, so he made a serious attempt at quoting on the job.  He walked down to Circular Quay, checked that both sides of the harbour were level, which isn't really all that silly when you consider how little else in a big city is on the level.  Anyhow, he checked the site, picked up a bit of sandstone to see what it weighed, estimated the distance with his trained bushman's eye, and went off to price tools in a hardware shop.

He reckoned he needed four crowbars, four picks, four shovels, four wheelbarrows, two sweat rags (seeing it was only a small job), and a few other odds and ends.  All up, buying only the best, he reckoned that he could get all the gear for fifteen hundred, he estimated the other costs, mainly food and drink, at three and a half thousand, and he allowed himself six thousand or so, and in the end he offered to do the whole job for eleven thousand.

Well when the politicians saw this quote from Mick, they were amazed, especially as the cheapest prices from the big firms were all for squillions and squillions.  They had a quick chat round the back of Parliament House, and said to each other that if this bloke's on the level (and that was unlikely in a big city like Sydney, they all agreed) but if he's really on the level, they said, well maybe we oughta get the job done.

Then one of the wiser ones suggested that maybe this is a put-up job by the other side, the Opposition, something to do with the election that's coming, and so they called Mick in to look him over and question him extra carefully.

"Look here, Mick," said one of them, "why do you need four of all these tools?  Are you only using four people on the job?"

"No," says Crooked Mick, "I'm doing it all meself."

"Then why do you need four of everything?"

Mick said patiently, like he's talking to a baby, "Because I always use one in each hand."

Well they looked him up and down, and then one of them made the point that while he was quite big, they can't see that he's got any more than the standard issue of everything, including hands.

"Look," says Mick, "I'm going to dig from the north side in the morning, then in the afternoon, I'll get a ferry to town, eat me lunch on the way over, and dig from the south side.  I plan to meet up in the middle on the nineteenth day.  I thought them ferry boat people might get upset if I took me tools across, so I thought I'd have two sets.  Anyhow, the break'll give me tools time to cool down."

This was probably the longest speech Mick ever made, but the politicians weren't impressed.  You see, those blokes'd mag the tail off a Speewah scrub bull before breakfast, and they thought Mick was real taciturn, which made him a threat in their eyes.

Their chief worrier came back with another question.  "What happens if you don't meet up in the middle?" he asks.

"Then you'll get two tunnels for the price of one," says Mick, calm as you like.

Anyhow they had the election the next week, and the other mob got in, and changed everything, which included cancelling the plans for the tunnel.  Still, when the drought broke two days later, Mick upped hooks and went back to the Speewah, and gave the contracting game the miss.  At least when you're shearing, he said, the sheep don't ask stupid questions.


* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Crooked Mick and the drop bears

I've been busy, finishing a book that I will talk about here later, though my facebook friends know all about it, and are probably getting heartily sick of it.  Anyhow, here's something I prepared earlier...

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There was one serious problem, back before the big flood, and that was the drop bears in the Speewah Ironbarks.  Now if you want to be really fussy, of course, they aren't bears at all, but a form of koala with a carnivorous habit.

Like the koalas, the drop bears are marsupials, with the same sort of pouch.  Funny thing is that the koalas and the drop bears both have a pouch that faces backwards.  The scientists say this is because they evolved from a sort of burrowing animal just like the wombat, which also has a backward-facing pouch.

I reckon Mick would've got the Sydney Harbour tunnel done easier if he'd used a couple of drop bears, if they can burrow, because their claws can rip into a Speewah Ironbark and slice through steel, but there's no reasoning with one of them—and even less chance of reasoning with two of them.

Back to the pouches though, a pouch like that makes sense in a wombat, because it digs burrows in the ground, but it seems just a bit odd in an animal that mostly lives in trees.  Anyhow, that's how the koala and the drop bear are, though the scientists at the museum are still arguing about whether the drop bear is more like a koala or a wombat.  Still, just goes to show that nature is sometimes a bit dumb.

The drop-bears are even dumber, when you come to it, and that was how Crooked Mick managed to get the problem under control, around the Speewah homestead area.  You see, ordinary drop-bears are usually only able to prey on small marsupials, things up to the size of an ordinary rabbit, but everything on the Speewah is big, including the rabbits and the drop-bears.

Some of them, from time to time, have been known to attack humans, using the same method that they use on small animals, even in the suburbs of the towns and cities along the east coast.  That is, they drop from a great height, and sink their razor-sharp canine teeth into the victim's throat, slashing the jugular vein, then they leap to one side, and wait for the victim to fall over.  As a matter of fact, I saw one try it in the Sydney Domain, round the back of Parliament House, one time, but it attacked a politician, and they're all bloodless anyhow.

Usually, the bears drink the victim's blood, but some of the more daring drop-bears on the Speewah had developed a taste for human flesh.  There are no two ways about it. They were man-eaters, though they seemed to prefer being woman-eaters and child-eaters, so people were pretty cranky about that.  We didn't mind too much when they just knocked off an overseer or two, but when they had a go at one of the shearers, we got good and cranky, I can tell you.

Anyhow, Crooked Mick knew a thing or two, and he knew how the original inhabitants of the area had solved the problem of drop-bears.  Walk through the area with two spears held vertically, one against each ear, and going well above the head, and make a sort of drop-bear kebab: that was how the Koori people used to deal with the problem.  In good times, Mick had been told, one stroll through a drop-bear grove, and you had a feast for the whole tribe, all neatly skewered on two spears.

Mick's first attempt was with a couple of crowbars, sharpened with a good stone, and that nearly did for him.  You see, he hadn't scaled up to a proper Speewah size.  The first two drop-bears on each side filled the crowbars up, and the ones that rained down after that bounced off their cousins on the crowbar, landed softly, and came in at Mick, spitting and snarling.

Luckily, Crooked Mick doesn't panic.  Nobody on the Speewah panics, but if anybody was ever going to, this would be the time.  There must have been a hundred of the things coming at him from all sides, crazed for blood: we were half a mile away, watching from out in the open, and we could hear the noise from there.

Anyhow, Mick stayed calm, and waving the two crowbars around, he flung off the four impaled drop-bears, which flew over our heads and off into the distance, and then ran straight at the live drop-bears, roaring and using the crowbars as two clubs.

Instead of stabbing, with the risk of getting the crowbars caught in the tough hides of the animals, he went through methodically, smashing the canines of each animal as it came within reach, rendering them harmless.  A few of them, disarmed in this way, retreated to the trees, but they were soon replaced by more drop-bears, drawn in by the noise and the smell.

Meanwhile, the boss and three of his mates had ridden up with rifles, and they opened up on the injured drop-bears on the ground.  They were good shots, so every now and then they dropped a bullet down the throat of a snarling animal and killed it, but most of the bullets just bounced off their hides.

That made it hard shooting for them, because they had to make sure a stray ricochet didn't get Crooked Mick.  Still, Mick was wearing a Speewah kangaroo skin vest and trousers, so he was about as safe as a knight in armour, from all but a really unlucky shot.

Anyhow, in the end, the drop-bears withdrew, still snarling.  There must have been four hundred dead ones, littered across the ground as we moved in with carbide-tipped chainsaws to skin them, and twice as many again, up in the trees.  We kept a good eye on them as we skinned the dead ones, I can tell you, but they seemed to have had enough for one day.

That night, Crooked Mick was busy in the smithy, clanging and banging away.  The Professor, who knew about these things, said it reminded him of Siegfried, who was a German bloke who killed drop-bears and things in some opera.  At least, I think that's what he said.  Anyhow, by daybreak, Mick had these two wicked-looking skewers, at least ten times his height, opening out into a broad sort of sword blade, which was as sharp as his axe, then flaring into a shield below that.

The boss came down about then, so Mick explained that the idea was to have the drop-bears impale themselves, slide down and be slice open on the sword part, and then be thrown to one side by the shield part.  The boss reckoned a few of the drop-bears would only be lightly wounded, but Mick pointed out that the wounds would make good targets for the riflemen, and give the bullets a way in.

Well, it worked a dream.  Mick went into the drop-bear groves, one by one, got nearly all of them with his bear-sticker, and the boss and his mates did for the wounded ones.  There were a few drop-bears left, the young ones which had not acquired a taste for human blood.  As Mick pointed out, it was only the ones which attacked him that died that day.

We were able to leave the groves further out alone, where the drop-bears weren't killers, and later, Mick even trapped a few adults and brought them in to ensure the survival of the species in the area, by providing a balanced population.  Like I say, he's a real softy, at heart.  Smart, but.


* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Crooked Mick and the MCC

I probably never told you about the time that Mick put together a team that beat the English at cricket.  You won't find it mentioned in Wisden, either, because the MCC paid a lot of money to get the whole thing hushed up.  Too embarrassing, you see.

What happened was that the Poms were taking a few days off on one of their tours of Australia, and some joker decides to take them out to the Speewah.  He gets them on a train to Bandywallop (the town was still there then), and loads them into the back of a truck, and hauls them out to the Speewah, where they go around, looking at things and generally expressing surprise.

Not as much surprise at first, though, until Flash Jack explains that what they thought was kangaroos in the home paddock was really rabbit fleas, being got ready for being set on the Speewah rabbits.  This was just after the myxomatosis was introduced out there, and so we was breeding these special fleas.  We didn't get in soon enough, though, and that was what finished Bandywallop, but that's another story.

"Haw," says one of the English players, looking at the fleas, "I suppose everything you do out here is that much larger than life!".  The rest of the Poms joined in making honking sounds that we sort of recognised as laughter.  Anyhow, the thing is, Lazy Harry was sitting over on a fence, and he says to them how we played a pretty larger than life game of cricket, too.

Well one thing led to another, and the upshot was that we agreed to have a quick limited overs match, Speewah vs the MCC.  We explained the special local rules, like what you do if a skied ball gets lodged in a mosquito, and how we used the dogs to fetch any ball hit for a six.  They thought that was a bit odd till we pointed out that the cricket field we used was the home paddock, and they saw how far across the paddock was.

"Haw, you don't get many sixes, then, do you?" says the first Pom, the one that started it all.  "No more than two an over, and that's only when Mick's batting," explains Lazy Harry.  By now the Poms reckon their legs are being pulled, and so they start needling us, trying to organise a side bet, just like Lazy Harry had hoped.  He might've been lazy, but Harry used to love easy money, rest his soul.

So Harry made all sorts of to and fro noises, and the Poms kept on raising the bet, and then they even gave us odds of five to one.  That was when I bought in.  "We'll take the bet," says I, "so long as you give us ten runs start."

"Haw," says the chief Pom again, "we'll give you ten runs start a piece, my man."  So I says nicely that no, thanks, ten runs for the team is all we ask, and I can see one or two of them starting to wonder if they might be in over their heads, all of a sudden.

Anyhow, Mick was out in the paddock, rolling a ten thousand gallon water tank back and forwards to even out the pitch, being careful not to spill any water out of it, because the Poms had two really good spin bowlers that tour.  Then he puts on his oldest pair of boots, and bunny-hops down the pitch, flattening out the corrugations, and there's a pitch as good as any they ever prepared at the SCG.

One of the Poms was watching him through binoculars, and I could see he was impressed with Mick's size.  And that was before I gently pointed out that he was looking through the wrong end of the binoculars.  Funny, when those Poms get a shock, they go whiter than those flannels they wear.

Well they turned out like a proper All-England team, and we turned out in whatever we had on.  We looked like something the cat dragged in, but so long as we had Crooked Mick in the team, we couldn't miss, especially with Flash Jack officiating over the toss.  Which we won, let me add.

Then we made our first mistake: Flash Jack and Crooked Mick were the openers, but they mixed up ends, and so it was Flash Jack that got the strike.  He was out first ball, clean bowled.  In that over, we lost seven players from eight balls, and Mick never got a look-in.

Then they changed ends, and Mick was at the crease.  The first ball that comes at him, he slams for all he's worth, but with us seven wickets for no runs, he can't risk getting caught, so he slams it into the ground, where it goes underground, bounces round a rabbit burrow, and pops out at the keeper's feet, right behind him.

Now I should mention that the batsman at the other end was Lazy Harry, so Mick knew better than to start running, or one of them would've got run out.  Next ball, he puts all his force into it, same thing happens, only this time, he broke the bat.

In all that over, he broke five bats, but he still managed to hit a six on each of the sixth and seventh balls, then he decided to take a risk with the last ball of the over.  So he hit it straight up into the sky, so high that he and Lazy Harry have time to shuffle through for twenty three runs.  They were safe though, because when the ball came down again, it was hot from re-entering the atmosphere, so the keeper got a hand to the ball, but screamed and dropped it, and retired hurt.

Still, there were only two bats left now, and the Poms protested that they wanted to have two bats to use in their innings, so Mick sent for a crow bar, and used that in the next over to score four fours, a six, and a single that kept him at the crease for the next over, and that set the pattern.  We declared at lunch with 473 runs on the board, all scored by Mick.

The first two Poms padded up, and Lazy Harry suggests that it would save time if the next five or so padded up as well.  The Poms were really looking worried by now, especially as they had twigged that Mick was going to bowl.  And worry they might.

Mick's first ball was slow and curly, and completely beat the England captain, who adjusted his cap and nodded to himself as though he knew what to expect now.  He didn't.  As Mick came in for the second delivery, the England captain danced down the pitch, just as Mick let fly with one of his fastest.

The ball reached the ground, burrowed beneath the batsman's feet, deflected off the claypan two feet down, and came out of the ground just in time to snap the middle stump.  I was keeping wicket, so I saw it all, but from square leg, which is where I always went for Mick's second delivery.  He got two more that over.

Well I would have to say that they were quite good batsmen, and Flash Jack bowled from the other end, looking for revenge, but he didn't find any.  In fact, one of the Poms came very close to a six, so they were clearly world-class batsmen.  Anyhow, he came close, as I say, but Mick was there, and took a superb catch, just inside the boundary.

Then Mick came back on again, and got three more, which put Flash Jack back in, and among the tail-enders, so he got his revenge then.  And that was how we beat one of the best England teams ever sent to Australia by the MCC.  Lucky for them that there were no journalists present, and the Speewah boys kept quiet about it, because they didn't like too much fuss and bother.

Mick could've played for Australia, you know, and I asked him once why he didn't.  He said that if he did, he would've had to go to England, and that didn't attract him, because his grandmother said it was a terrible place where all the convicts came from.  So he just played for the Speewah, now and then.


* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

The last fox on the Speewah

Somebody asked me the other day about Crooked Mick using two axes at once when he was cutting fence posts.  Not possible, they alleged.  That just goes to show some people don't know very much about the way Australians look after their axes.  The standard timber-getter's demonstration involves putting spit on the forearm, and shaving all the hairs off, that's how sharp they keep their axes.

Crooked Mick did this trick once, for an admiring audience of city people who happened to be out visiting the Speewah.  (Taking them city folk out there in the first place was a mistake, but that's another story, one I'd rather not get involved in.)

Anyhow, after Mick had performed the trick for them, one woman gushes to him, "Do you always shave yourself on the face that way, Mr. Mick?"

Well, Mick looks her up and down, wondering why she called him that, because he was always just plain "Mick" when you talked to him, but she was obviously an ignorant city type, so he answered her patiently.

"No," he says.  "I use the back of the axe to shave meself."

She looks at that part of the axe, and says "But it's flat and blunt.  How could you possibly shave yourself with that?"

"Yersss," he drawls.  "Too right, it's flat, and just as well, or I'd cut meself.  I use the back so's I can drive the whiskers in and then I bite them off inside."  So saying, he performed this delicate operation.

First he drove the whiskers in, and then there was this awful grinding and crunching sound as the whiskers were mashed and mangled under Mick's molars.  Then he stepped to the edge of the verandah of the shearers' quarters, and spat at a nearby fence, just as a fox jumped over the top of the fence.

Well this surprised everybody, because this was the first fox ever seen on the Speewah, but the fox was even more surprised, as it instantly became the last fox on the Speewah.  Some of Mick's whiskers had been crushed to razor-sharp slivers, and these flew faster than the others.  Reaching the fox first, these slivers passed under the skin, and neatly separated the hide from the body.

As you might expect, the fox jumped into the air and then took off, leaving the hide standing in the air for just a moment, until the less crushed and heavier whisker fragments reached the hide.  Because these were so much heavier, the force of their impact drove the hide back into the fence, where they impaled it, perfectly stretched, against the fence.

Now I've seen the hide: it's still there, so you'll realise that when I say Mick's axes were sharp, I mean what I say.

The fox slunk away and hid in a swamp, but they say a mosquito came down in the night and swallowed it whole.  Maybe the mossies developed a taste for fox meat after that, but there never were any other foxes seen on the Speewah.

* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Speewah pumpkins

Then there was the time that Crooked Mick had been persuaded to work as cook once again.  I should point out that Mick didn't really enjoy cooking all that much, but it helped to keep the peace, and besides, it was bad for morale when Mick was shearing because he was so much faster than anybody else.  So when they could, the boys would try to talk him into cooking.

I was glad, because I was working that shed, and I wouldn't have got a look-in, me that twice out-shore Jacky Howe when he was in his prime, even when I gave Jacky first choice of sheep.  That was how sharp the competition was on the Speewah in them days.

Anyhow, Flash Jack from Gundagai was there as well, and he was helping Mick out.  I think he wanted to learn a few tricks of the culinary art, because by that time Jack was a reasonably good bloke with the pots himself, when he tried.  The day I have in mind, Mick gets Jack to take an axe down "to cut a dray-load off the pumpkin, and bring it back for soup".

I was there when he said this, just passing by the cook house, and I commented that it must have been a pretty good pumpkin if you could cut a dray-load off it.  Mind you, I didn't know then about Smiling Annie's special pumpkins, or I would have known that it was a pretty average sort of pumpkin.  Anyhow, like I say, I didn't know about those things then, but Mick let me down gentle.

"Yes," he says, "but there's a few problems with a pumpkin that size.  Why, just yesterday, I took a ladder down there to cut a load off the top where it's really tender, and I dropped me best axe in there."

"Annoying!", I says.

"Completely vexatious, in fact", he says.  I think I mentioned that Mick was a bit rough in some of his ways, but he had a way with the words.  "But when I climbed down inside", he continued, "it was nowhere to be seen.  There was another bloke that I found in there, and he hadn't seen it either."

"What was he doing in there?"

"Looking for a bullock team that strayed.  Anyhow, neither of us found my axe, and we never even saw a trace of the bullocks, all day."

"What will you do now?"

"I'll lower me dog down there in a basket tomorrow, and let him find them both, and bring 'em out."

Now that, I knew, would work, because a Speewah dog can do just about anything: remind me to tell you all about them some time.  But before I go, I should tell you about how Flash Jack got his start as a cook.

There wasn't any jobs going on Lignum Downs one year, except as a cook, and Flash Jack needed work, as his pants were beginning to go.  So he took the job, but one or two of the older hands know when to smell a rat, and so one of them asked him a trick question.  "What would you use an axe-head for when yer cookin' a galah?" he asks Jack.

"Easy," says Jack.  "You put an axe-head in with the galah, and when the axe-head's soft, you throw away the galah, and eat the axe-head, right?"

"No," says the bloke, looking around at the others.  "You eat the galah, don't you, mates?"

They nodded in agreement, but Flash Jack was ready for them.  "Not on the Speewah, you don't," he explains.  "If I'd known you meant sissified city galahs, of course I would've said that.  But as a professional cook, I work on the material I know best, whenever I can."

"Garn," says one of them.  "You can't cook.  Why, I could cook better than you.  Except sheep dip, and I reckon that soup we had last night'd kill even them Speewah sheep ticks you was talking about."

"So would I," says another, adding that he's not a bad cook himself, and then a whole lot of them chime in with the same claim, and one of them reckons he used to be a baker, and asks why hasn't Jack baked any bread for them, but Jack isn't fazed for a moment.

"I'll tell you what, then," says Flash Jack.  "We'll have a baking competition, and see who can bake the best bread."

Well they all agree to this, and then Jack pulls his trick.  "Seeing as I'm a professional cook, I'll be the judge and oversee what people are doing.  Then at the end, I'll take on the winner, and the runners-up can judge between us."

It's just as well for us that Flash Jack never took up politics, or who knows where we'd be now.  Of course, what he did was to watch the competitors, feed everybody on the winning entries, and then at night, he'd try out the recipes, and dropped his disasters in a hole.  He threw the first failure into a billabong, but all the fish in there died, so after that he buried the ones that didn't work.

By the time he had to take on the winners, Flash Jack knew all about baking, and he never looked back after that.  Except occasionally, when he felt a pang of guilt about all those dead fish, and the fish pie he'd made out of them, and the damage it could've done.

* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Flash Jack goes droving

The thing about Flash Jack, he's a terrible liar, not that he'd call it anything as plain as that.  He'd just say he was a bit inclined to spin a yarn now and then, but other people don't always agree.  They'd tell you straight out that if Flash Jack bumped into the truth on a sunny day, he'd walk straight past, without so much as a flicker of recognition.

He was always a bit that way, but the tendency to exaggerate got worse when he was a bit past his prime.  Take the night when he was quite old, and some city bloke asked him if he'd ever been droving.  "Droving?" Jack said, "Droving?  I've drove cattle across every border in Australia, I've taken them from the east coast to the west coast, and from Cape York to Hobart."

Now this city bloke was no fool.  He even knew that there's a big lump of ocean, the Bass Strait, separating Hobart and the rest of Tasmania from Cape York and the rest of Australia, so naturally he challenged Jack, saying "Wouldn't your cattle have got a bit wet, mate?"

"Naaah," said Jack.  "We went the other way round."

Anyhow, you could see that this bloke, while he was pretty well bamboozled by Jack's reply, wasn't what you would call completely convinced.  In fact you could see he was pretty sure there was something fishy, and I don't mean tuna from the Bass Strait, neither.  So he kept asking these difficult sort of questions, and Jack kept answering them, and in the end the bloke gave up, but when he did, another bloke chipped in.  "What was the hardest droving job you ever did, Jack?"

Quick as you like, Jack answered that one.  "That'd be the time I took four hundred head through the Speewah back desert, across the sucking swamps, and then down to the big smoke."

"That doesn't sound like much of a job to me," said the bloke.  "That isn't exactly what you'd call a large mob, is it?"

"It is when the four hundred head are all 44-gallon drums," said Jack.

"Well, I don't believe that for a minute!" said the bloke, and a few other voices joined in, saying the same thing.

"It's the honest truth," said Jack.  "A mate of mine found out that all these drums were coming out full from the city, and then just being dumped anywhere, and back in the big smoke, they were worth a packet.  Anyhow, Smiling Annie was heading that way with her daughter Alice, and they reckoned they'd had a few domesticated drums in running with the chooks one time when they were staying in town in Bandywallop, and if we had a couple of those at the front, they said, the rest of the mob'd follow on as easy as you like.  Anyhow, we just started with a few drums, and built the herd up as we went along, but I'm afraid we had a lot to learn."

"What, about being truthful?" asks the bloke who'd started it all, but Jack just took that in his stride.

"No, about droving drums.  For a start, we should've taken ear plugs so's we could sleep at night — you don't need to put bells on them drums, I can tell you.  And we shouldn't have gone along parallel to the railway line out of Bandywallop, up towards the Speewah spur line.  It was an easy track to follow, nice and clear of obstructions, and fenced on the railway side, so we could keep them penned in, but we hadn't allowed for the train coming through.

"Scattered the drums all over the place, that did, and it took us three days to round them all up again, and I'll tell you now, the sound of several hundred fully-grown drums stampeding over stony ground is one I don't want to hear again.  Wouldn't've got them in that quick if Crooked Mick hadn't shown up with his dog and a couple of pups, and he later lent us the pups for the trip, luckily.  We wouldn't've stood a chance in the sucking swamps without them.

"Anyhow, we got them together again, ran 'em through Yandackworroby as easy as you please — Mick's pups had 'em marching in three files by then, so Alice and Annie and me stopped for a bit of refreshment while the pups paraded the drums through town.  We were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves till we got to the other side and found a stock inspector waiting for us, a real mongrel who reckoned them drums had to be dipped against rust and five different diseases before they went any further.

"No worries, though.  The pups dug a trench as soon as they realised what was needed, and Annie and Alice butchered a couple of poor-looking stray drums that'd joined the herd, just before Yandackworroby, and boiled up a mean sort of drum dip in them, stuff that'd make any self-respecting disease run away, stuff that stuck to the drums and kept the rust off as well, and poured it into the pups' trench.  Then we had to send 'em though."

"They would've floated, wouldn't they?" asked the troublesome questioner.

"I was just getting to that.  Yeah, they float all right, but if you tie their legs together, and wrap a rope four times round, then drag 'em though with the rope, that spins 'em and gets all sides.  You're right — there was no way we could make them go under that dip.  One good thing, though.  The pups took a strong dislike to this stock inspector, and the one that was doing the pulling would drag each drum over near the inspector while the other one nipped the leg tie and released the drum, so it was free to shake itself.  Catching that inspector for the first few was a bit hard, but after the tenth, he brushed against a tree and got stuck to it, and the rest of them were easy.  By the end, he was no longer really visible.

"Anyhow, we got them out on the other side, and the stock inspector being in no position to say much, we headed off.  Along the way, we collected a few mean-looking scrub drums, but they didn't seem to be doing no harm, so we let them come along.  Looking back, it was stupid, but we just didn't know, and things were really going well. You see, the pups had conceived this idea of making the drums butt each others tails, so they were stuck together in cylinders of fifteen or twenty drums each, which was great in the open country, but got nasty when we hit the Blue Mulga, but that was when the thunderstorm hit, and that stampeded them straight through the middle and out before the rain hit and let them split up.  That's why the road there goes so straight — it was them drums, boring through, that laid down the line of it.

"Well after that, it was fairly easy going till we hit the sucking swamps, when we had to rope them together so they'd go in single file.  That way, if one of them fell in, the ones in front just leaned forward, and the ones at the back leaned back a bit, and pulled the lost one out.  Then just as we got clear of the swamps, and thought we were on the home stretch, some of them drums began to calve, and we were stuck once again, surrounded by the strangest mix of billy cans, jerry cans, and even a watering can, all tangling around our feet, and they never stopped clanking.  I don't know where them scrub drums came from, but they'd obviously had a very mixed pedigree.  Anyhow, we had to wait until they grew up into 4-gallon drums, then we drove the lot down to the big smoke, and cleaned up.  But it wasn't easy money, I can tell you that."

Well, the people listening all swallowed it, but just about the whole thing was completely untrue.  Yes, Jack had been droving through there, so he described the country accurately enough.  That's true, but as for the rest, you can't drive 44-gallon drums across there, because they'd either get bogged, or they'd go lame from the desert sections, because they're too heavy.

In fact, all he ever took through there was a bunch of about three hundred big goannas for the goanna oil industry, and he'd borrowed a pup from Mick's dog, one that'd escaped the lazy genes, so Jack didn't even have to do much, not with the pup, and Alice and Annie along — that part's true enough.

And if the truth be known, Flash Jack couldn't handle a mob of big 44-gallon drums, anyhow.  So what he actually did was drive a really big mob of 4-gallon drums once, though not over that route, and he reckoned it was acceptable to call that a small mob of 44-gallon drums, and to embroider the route he took.  In my book, that makes him no better than a liar.


* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Crooked Mick makes a mistake

Now don't get me wrong.  Crooked Mick was just an ordinary bloke, and just as inclined to make a mistake as I am — maybe more, because I know of at least one occasion when he did just that, though it was more a mistake of judgement than anything else.

It was the drop bears that were behind it, of course, that and Mick's dog being so lazy.  And I suppose Mick not thinking things through carefully enough.

A few of the back paddock drop bears were turning nasty, and attacking the women again.  This wasn't a problem for Smiling Annie who would just look up as they hurtled down, and smile at them, which'd make them turn right round and hurtle back up again.  It's true — one of Annie's special smiles was enough to repeal all the laws of physics, so bending gravity a bit was easy.

And Alice had no trouble at all, since she'd been strangling drop bears with her hands since she was five.  We have a name for hands as big as Alice's: we call them bear hands, but that's just our little joke.  You need a few jokes like that in the bush, because nothing much ever happens.

Anyhow, those two were safe enough, and Gertie, Greasy Smith's youngest, she'd just charm them with this charm thing an old Aboriginal lady gave her to ward off the evil spirits.  This charm was a piece of carved and fire-hardened brigalow about four foot long, and knobby, and Gertie always said it worked just like a charm, and had done for all of the twenty years she'd been using it.

Some of the other women and quite a few of the men, though, found themselves threatened by the drop bears, so Mick decided to do something creative.  He went out with his dog and showed the dog how he wanted it to roll a wave of rabbits over the drop bears after he'd gone running through, tempting the drop bears to have a go at him, and come down onto the ground.

Now as I said, the dog was lazy, and it soon got fed up with rounding up enough rabbits to trample the drop bears to death, and because they never got them all, Mick was always wanting him to turn the rabbit wave around, and run it back through the bear trees once more.

So being lazy, the dog decided to fix the drop bears once and for all, and he taught four of the other dogs how to work the rabbit wave, then ride up over the top of the wave, land clear on the other side, and then turn the wave back the way it came.

The idea was just to go steam-rollering back and forth with this wave of rabbits, flattening any drop bears that were on the ground, and being cannibalistic, the surviving bears would come to the bait, as soon as you got one or two of them, so it was all a bit like priming a pump.

Well the first day worked a treat, and being a Sunday, nobody paid much attention to what the dogs were up to, and it was only later that Gertie happened to mention that she had seen a bunch of them working the rabbit wave, all on their own.

The next Sunday, though, was a different matter.  The dogs must've rounded up every rabbit in the Speewah back paddock, because the wave was running at ten foot high, piling up to twelve or thirteen in the shallows, and it was close to unstable all of the time, according to Truthful Lewis, who saw the thing from the top of a Speewah ironbark, where he'd been chased by a bush alligator, which was sitting at the bottom of his tree and leering hungrily at him.  The rabbits got the alligator as well, on their second pass, so Truthful was happy to just sit and watch what was going on.

As I said, the wave was close to unstable, because there was just too much mass in it, and the disaster came on the fourth pass.  What happened was the dogs got this really big wave going, a bit like when you keep pushing a kid on a swing, but the fourth pass was just too much, and too rushed, and the bunnies on the bottom were getting trampled by the ones on top, and that slowed the base down.

So when the dogs rode up onto the crest of a wave, ready to drop down and turn the wave back the other way, the unthinkable happened, and the wave turned into a dumper.  Well the dogs went over the top, down the front, and got dragged under and rolled over by the rabbit wave, they had their faces pushed into the sand, and generally got treated in a demeaning way.

So when they surfaced, snorting and sputtering behind the wave which was now beginning to falter, they were good and mad.  And when Speewah dogs get mad, they roar.  And when any sensible animal hears a Speewah dog roar, it gets going, which is why the rabbit wave re-formed and took off across the plain, with the dogs still roaring behind them.  They might have been as silly as rabbits, but that roaring soon got them sensible.

All the warning the people of Bandywallop got was a low rumbling noise as the rabbits came pouring over the plain, with the dogs roaring behind them.  Of course, they thought it was a stampede of scrub bulls, and that was enough to persuade them all to scramble up onto a large rock behind Mulligan's pub, carrying whatever they could.  So they were well placed to see how high the tide came.

Except, that is, for a bloke called Long Harry, whose legs were so short that he couldn't make it to the top in time, and just as people were reaching out for him, the wave hit, and he was carried away.  Luckily for him, old Mulligan used to keep some planks up on top of the rocks, and the people up there were holding one of the planks out to him.

Now Long Harry had been down the Big Smoke once or twice, and knew a bit about waves.  So when he realised he couldn't make it to safety, he yelled out to Mulligan to let go the plank, and he rode that wave of rabbits, always slanting out to the left, until the wave died away.

Then he stepped off, and brought the board back with him, walking for two days and two nights to get back to where Bandywallop ought to have been.  When he got there, there wasn't a bit of the town left that was as big as his board, and there hasn't been to this day.  All the people just packed up, and moved to Yandackworroby, where life in the bush is slow and uninteresting, the way it ought to be.

But none of it would've happened if Mick hadn't made a bad mistake of judgement.  And even then, there would've been no problems if the dog hadn't been lazy and strong-willed, and even more lacking in judgement than Crooked Mick.  But it was the laziness that made Mick's dog forget to stop and think.  No doubt about that at all.

At least it kept the drop bears under control for a few years.

* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.