Remembering the Past Australia

A man once went over Niagara Falls in a barrel and when asked why he did it he said: "Well, I was the first to go, anyhow!" This craze for being the first to do anything, even though it may sometimes be silly, has had important results. When Hargrave was experimenting with his box kites he was looked upon as an amiable lunatic, and when the Wright Brothers announced that they had actually flown, few people believed it. I cannot claim that I was ever the first to do anything, but I saw the beginnings of a lot of things — motoring for instance.

I was a passenger with J. M. Arnott in his car on the first reliability trial from Sydney to Melbourne, and "trial" is exactly the right word. All sorts and conditions of cars competed, and as for the drivers — they required to be seen to be believed.

One elderly enthusiast turned out in a little one-cylinder rubby-dubby, of which he know so little that his only accessories for the trip were a tack-hammer and a pair of pincers. Falling to get anyone with experience to accompany him, he had picked up a Sydney larrikin for company; but after the first day's drive (from Sydney to Goulburn) this miscreant deserted him, saying that he preferred dishonour to death, or words to that effect.

The elderly driver thereafter spent most of his time on his back under the car, and finally threw in the towel at Gundagai.

A French driver named Maillard had taken part in some of the big motor races in France, and was a hot favourite for the event. He was driving a De Dion, and beat everybody to Goulburn. On leaving Goulburn he went past the other cars like an express train, but unfortunately he had no knowledge of Australian roads. He could not even speak English.

In those days the roads beyond Goulburn were crossed here and there by steep gutters to drain off the water.

RACV foundation member Harley Tarrant outside Goulburn, NSW, in a 10 hp Argyll car competing in the Sydney-Melbourne 1905 Dunlop Reliability Trial.

They were quite invisible from a distance, and all the experienced drivers had their passengers standing up on the back seat to yell out "gutter" when one hove in sight. The poor little Frenchman, blissfully unconscious of this, hit the first gutter at fifty miles an hour, sending his car up in the air like a hurdle horse which has hit a jump. Parts of the car were scattered all over the road and the Frenchman ran from one to another shouting: "Pourquoi les canivaux?" (why are the gutters there?) As I had some sort of Surry Hills knowledge of French I did my best to explain things, but the only result was to make him cry worse than ever.

A Melbourne stock-broker, having his first long drive, had a first class "cockatoo" standing up in the back of his car (cockatoos always set a sentinel to look out for trouble) and did so well between Goulburn and Gundagai that he insisted on shouting champagne for all the drivers and their associates. Nothing like this had happened in Gundagai since the big flood and as soon as the word got round the whole population of the town drifted into the bar and started to lap up champagne like milk. He drank with all and sundry and did himself so well that when he left Gundagai next morning the bridge was not wide enough for him and he hit the abutment fair and square with his radiator. This car, also, became a casualty; but the owner said that if a man was a sport it was up to him to BE a sport and he insisted having the car repaired at Gundagai, so that he could save his face with his friends by finishing the trial even if everybody else had weighed in and gone home when he arrived.

Sad to say the local blacksmiths were unequal to a repair job which practically meant taking the tail light and building a new car onto it. He and his cockatoo passed us somewhere about Seymour sitting on the remains of their car in a railway truck, waving bottles and shouting encouragement.

Other drivers were Charley Kellow, once a crack cyclist and, later on, famous as the owner of Heroic; Harrie Skinner, of Tivoli Theatre fame; and a death-or-glory boy whose name I cannot remember, but who was out to beat everybody for speed, and hang the consequences. He was driving a Renault, and, coming to a partly-opened railway gate, he opened it the rest of the way by hitting it with his car, thus saving perhaps half a minute but bending his axle. He was the last to leave and the first to arrive at every control, but he lost the reliability competition because of his bent axle. He said that he never expected to win it, anyhow, as he was not using the brand of tyres favoured by the promoters. We, ourselves, needed no such specious excuse, as we lost our chance by taking a wrong road near Tarcutta. We did not go 20 yards on the wrong road; but just to avoid going back those 20 yards we look a short cut across some long grass, apparently smooth, but it was like the Goulburn Road.

Somebody had dug a deep drain across it — a drain hidden by the long grass, like one of those pits they dig to catch wild animals in in Africa. Bang went some spokes of a wheel, but there were three perfectly good wheels left. Some flour-mill mechanics at Albury bolted stout timber supports on to either side of the wheel, and with many stoppages we got into Melbourne just before the speeches of welcome were quite finished!

Such was motoring in those days. Every horse that saw us, kept his tail up and bolted across country like a wallaby. If attached to a trap, so much the worse for the trap! At our stoppages en route the rude forefathers of the various hamlets would come up and put their hands on the radiator, to see whether it was hot; which it generally was — sometimes very hot. One of these veterans made all his following put their pipes out lest the car should blow up. Yet, the last time that a car stuck me up on that road a twelve-year-old boy got off a passing cart and put it right! The world moves, even if sometimes in the wrong directions.

Tarrant No 6. 2 cyl 10 h.p. which won the 1905 Dunlop Reliability Trial - Melbourne to Sydney & back. People illustrated from left to right - Mr. Joe Tarrant Manager, Accessory Dept. at the wheel, Capt. Harley Tarrant, with his wife & daughter. Car priced 375 (Photo: W. Stuart Ross)

Another of the novelties which this chronicler met within his time was the first introduction of rainbow trout to Australia. Among other rivers, the trout fry were liberated in the Goodradigbee River. Sufficient time was allowed them to grow up and then the local inhabitants set about catching them. A few blackfellows, hanging about the river, used to spend hours fishing for these trout with cod lines baited with half a parrot. They could see the trout jumping, but could not induce any of them to bite; and the trout, generally speaking, were voted a complete washout.

There was a tradition on this part of the river that a bunyip had once come ashore once — something like a calf with whiskers. If there were any truth in the story it was probably a seal which had found its way up from the mouth of the Murray, but the black-fellows believed that the bunyip was still in the river, and that it was eating all the trout which were big enough to bite. Otherwise why couldn't they catch them?

Then came the tourists from Sydney, fitted out to beat the band with artificial flies and spinners; but these people had little better luck than the blackfellows, for the river was so full of feed that the trout did not bother themselves to rise at flies when they could get the pupae of dragon flies and other delicacies without any trouble. Dry-fly purists, and chuck-and-chance-it fishermen who lowered their flies down the rapids, alike had the poorest of luck; but they held on in the belief that only a barbarian would use live bait for trout. Then somebody caught a big haul of trout using grasshoppers for bait — but the president of the dry-fly school said that he would sooner use a fish-trap than a grasshopper. Later on, he was seen by a sheep-musterer on his hands and knees grabbing at some objects in the grass. Said the sheep-musterer: "Are you ketchin' grasshoppers, mister?"

"No," said the dry-fly purist. "I'm looking for my knife ! I dropped it here somewhere."

Believe it or not, the trout in the southern rivers had an effect on the pastoral industry in those parts. Owners of small mountain stations, stuck away in inaccessible places with only a few sheep, were always hard put to it to get good shearers but when the trout came in the shearers caught the trout-fishing mania and all sorts of crack shearers — really great men — would push out to these places for the sake of the fishing. One small settler on the Snowy had only a few sheep and no shearing machines. Meeting a couple of shearers on the road one day, he suggested that they should come out and shear his sheep for him.

"There's only about 1,500 sheep apiece for you," he explained, "but my wife does the cookin' and you'll have a nice holiday."

"Is there any fishin'?" was the question.

"Oh, yes, tons of trout. But I ought to tell yer I haven't got machines. We shear with the blades."

"With the blades! Why don't you take it off 'em with a hoe? Never mind, we'll come. And once we get started you won't be able to sack us — not while the fish are bitin'!"

In all parts of the world the "hill billies" are — well, I won't say greater thieves — but they are more enterprising and resourceful than those of the flat. They have to be, in order to get a living. Walter Scott himself wrote:

The American hill billies who went without boots and lived mostly on plug tobacco and moonshine liquor were classic examples. We had nothing quite like them in Australia, but we did the best we could.

By way of curing some sort of nervous breakdown I found myself for some years a hill billy, on 40,000 acres, consisting mainly of country that had been left over after the rest of the world was made.

The place had a history. It had been taken up in the early days by a man who had no capital and no station plant except a wheelbarrow. He built himself some sort of a humpy, got an assigned servant, and set out to build some yards. Yards and a branding iron were all that they wanted in those days to get a start in life. Moving the timber for the yards was a problem, but he solved it by hitching himself on with a sort of harness to the front of the wheelbarrow, while the assigned servant held up the handles and "drove" his boss, giving him such directions as "come over to the left a bit," "keep away from that gully," "look out the barrow don't run over you down this slope" and so on.

After a time this got on his nerves, and he sold out to a member of the Ryrie family, who did some real pioneering There were girls in the family, and one of them — afterwards known to hundreds and hundreds of patients as Matron Ryrie of The Terraces hospital — killed sheep when the men were not at home, and carried all the water for the house in buckets from the river.

Then came John MacDonald as next owner, a hardy and determined Scot, who afterwards became a big financial magnate and breeder of three Derby winners at his Mungie Bundie stud; but when he was at this mountain place he had little else than a branding iron and a fixed determination to use it.

Stockriding on the Upper Murray District Australia; Edwin Roper Loftus Stocqueler 1829-1895

The country was unfenced, and one could ride for miles and miles in the ranges seeing nothing but wild horses, wild cattle, wombats, and wallaroos, and hearing at night the chatter of the flying squirrels playing among the gum tree blossoms. His country bounded on a block taken up by a gentleman named Castles, of Cavan, at one time a schoolmaster, who had "gone bush" in the hope of making some money. Some of Mr. Castles's old pupils, sons of William Lee, who founded a then priceless stud of Shorthorns, gave Castles some breeding stock — Lee bulls and cows.

A schoolmaster was hardly the man to handle that country. Some of his young bulls got away, and their stock ran wild, unknown, unbranded, and mixed up with all sorts of pike-horned scrubbers which had escaped from other people.

All these unbranded clean-skins were the lawful property of anyone who could yard them, and MacDonald got them out of the mountains, not in tens and twenties, but in hundreds. Starting out at daylight with a couple of cattle dogs and a stockwhip, he took after the wild mobs; and when in after years I asked the oldest inhabitant whether MacDonald had been a good rider, he said: "Well, nothing out of the ordinary in the buckjumping line, but put him after a clean-skin and he'd show you some class. He'd take two or three falls rather than let a clean-skin get away from him."

He built trap yards away up in the mountains, sometimes working on by moonlight after his men had gone to camp and his trapyards were still there when I took the place. Unfortunately, by that time, the supply of clean-skins was exhausted.

It was to this mountain station that I succeeded when I went back to the bush.

As a station proposition it was best avoided; as a homestead there was nothing better. We had eight miles of a trout river, which ran all the year round, clear and cold in summer, a fierce snow-fed torrent in winter. As the sun was setting, the lyre-birds came out of their fastnesses and called to each other across the valley, imitating everything that they had ever heard. Gorgeous lories came and sat in rows on the spouting that ran round the verandah, protesting shrilly when their tails were pulled by the children. Bower birds with an uncanny scent for fruit would come hurrying up from the end of the garden when the housewife started to peel apples, and would sit on the window-sill of the kitchen, looking expectantly into the room.

Part of the run was enclosed by a dingo-proof fence of thirteen wires, with a strand of barbed wire at top and bottom; and outside of this there were about ten thousand acres of unfenced country, where one could put sheep when there was any water, and chance the dingoes coming in from Lobb's Hole.

One winter they came in when there were a couple of inches of snow on the ground, and the fiery cross was sent round to the neighbouring stations; for the presence of a "'dorg" will make the hill people leave all other work and go after him. We mustered some eight or ten armed men, and as I rode in front on a cream-coloured mountain pony I happened to look round at the overcoated and armed figures following me through the snow.

"Where," I thought, "have I seen that picture before!" And then I remembered it. Napoleon's retreat from Moscow! I, too, retreated from the mountain Moscow, fortunately with less loss than Napoleon, and resumed city life, not without regrets.

[Next, in Part 4, Mr. Paterson will tell the dramatic stories of Edmund Galley, "the Australian Dreyfus," and Morant, the social lion and dare-devil horseman, who was tried by court-martial and shot for killing a prisoner in South Africa in revenge for the death of his best friend.]

1. "Banjo" Paterson Tells His Own Story - 3. A "Reliability" Drive to Melbourne (1939, February 18). The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), p. 21.
2. A. B. Paterson, Banjo : portrait in oils, 1927 / Agnes Noyes Goodsir (1864-1939); Courtesy: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
3. RACV foundation member Harley Tarrant outside Goulburn, NSW, in a 10 hp Argyll car competing in the Sydney-Melbourne 1905 Dunlop Reliability Trial; Coutesy: RACV
4. Tarrant No 6. 2 cyl 10 h.p. which won the 1905 Dunlop Reliability Trial - Melbourne to Sydney & back.  People illustrated from left to right - Mr. Joe Tarrant Manager, Accessory Dept. at the wheel, Capt. Harley Tarrant, with his wife & daughter. Car priced 375 (Photo: W. Stuart Ross) Courtesy: Museums Victoria Collections
5. Stockriding on the Upper Murray District Australia; Edwin Roper Loftus Stocqueler 1829-1895; Courtesy: State Library Victoria