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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Colin Moore was my best friend, shearing buddy, fellow international harvester machinery enthusiast and the gentlest man I have ever met. He was closer than a brother. He was a very impressive looking strong man with his aboriginal features and strength. He once lifted the back of a car up so his daughter could crawl free after she rolled it over on the track to his farm. Colin’s mum Edie was a full blood aboriginal and his Dad was a Pom . Edie had a natural sense of humour and possessed a wonderful spontaneous laugh which she used all the time and it was impossible to be glum whenever she was around. Colin needed to be born in the little stone workers cottage at Kyanaba Station at Dandaragan where his parents and growing family lived. His Dad was employed by the Roberts family as a farm labourer. Due to the colour of Colin’s skin he was not allowed to be born at the Moora District Hospital which was just up the road. It was permissible for him to be born at the Mogumber Mission, one hundred kilometres to the east. Given that the family had no automobile the trip was out of the question so Colin followed the tradition of many of his brothers and sisters an was born at home. He was attended by family and relations and his umbilical cord was burnt off using the glowing red end of a burnt stick.
I first met Colin at Oliver’s shearing shed. He was the aboriginal shearer wearing the boots. He and I started a local team of shearers and rouseabouts made up of new land farmers and members of their families, we called ourselves the battlers. Colin and I sheared side by side for ten years and at night we would call each other on the telephone and spend hours combing through the for sale columns in the Elders Weekly magazine looking for second-hand machines. Crystal and I became honorary members of the Moore extended family and we were present at all of their family celebrations. Colin had married Pam, a white girl! and they had five kids. The Moore’s welcomed us always and I remember it as a very special time in our lives during some pretty tough years. Colin had inherited his mother’s wit and was always fastest on the draw with retorts or comments. Because of his heritage he lived in the present and always commented on my habit of thinking too far ahead “if I thought about the future too much I would have a nervous breakdown” he often said.
Because he lived in the present he always saw more detail on what was happening than I would. It stands to reason that aboriginal people lived in the present as his ancestors would have been focused on survival and thoughts about the week after next were probably far from their minds. Finding food and shelter today was probably the go, bugger next week it could look after itself and anyway one may be dead next week. Due to this ability of living in the present he would always be finding things that I had driven past. Once he stopped and picked up a whole tool set that was scattered over the road. I had driven past it and thought it a heap of chicken bones someone had thrown out of their car.
We were shearing at a neighbour’s shearing shed and over the weekend sixteen bales of wool had disappeared. The shed was on Minty’s farm and was conveniently placed, for thieves that is, close to the main road. The police were called and a car full of white defectives arrived from Perth. The shearers were the obvious suspects especially the black one however we both had excellent alibis so they, the white detectives reluctantly left us alone and blundered around looking for evidence. Colin watched them calmly, casually chatting with me as the shearing had paused whilst the investigation proceeded. Eventually they departed with whatever evidence that had gathered and headed off back to Perth. Colin and I were sitting outside on the loading ramp in the sun and he pointed two narrow lines of white clay on the road leading to the ramp where the stolen wool had been stored. He said “see those lines that is where the fine clay dust falls off the brake pads when the vehicle is backing up. And see these scuff marks; they are caused by a tandem trailer when it is forced to turn. “We sat quietly thinking for a bit before he spoke again “sixteen bales of wool will fit perfectly onto a one ton ute and a tandem trailer. That unusual white clay you can see can only be found near Cervantes at the coast. ” He paused and thought a bit more sipping a bit more tea, “the only person who I know who owns a one ton Ute and a tandem trailer and who lives at Cervantes is Joe Melba, Joe stole the wool!”he said. Well I said “why didn’t you tell the cops? “fuck them” he said “they are detectives let them find out for themselves.”
Colin and I went shearing at many pretty interesting places. One shed in particular I remember was the McPhees. Ted McPhee and Eddy McPhee ran the small farm and Mrs McPhee did the cooking. She also produced shell ornaments to generate some extra farm income. Eddy was a close friend of Colin and he used to help us out with farm machinery repairs as he was a gifted mechanic and welder. The McPhees had not changed with the times and still lived in an old shanty with tin walls. When the power came through they refused to connect the old hut as they had planned to move up to the shearing shed soon but never actually did. There were no screens on the windows of their old shack nor was there any lining on the walls. The walls were covered with pages torn from magazines with Australian landscapes. After years of smoke from the cooking fire they had become blackened. Mrs McPhee would cook Deb Mashed Potato and roast meat for the lunch and the blow flies would come from miles around to compete with us for the food. Eddy would sit at one end of the table with a large fly swat next to his plate and every so often he would grab it and take a swipe at a fly. Often the dead fly would end up after its death dive in one of our dinners. The Deb mashed potato was terrible stuff but we were too well mannered to tell Mrs McPhee. It caused massive indigestion all afternoon.
Like Henry Rolley, Ted and Eddy had a whole bunch of half wild cats. Eddy used to shoot parrots for their feed. Up at the shearing shed which was on the power waiting for the house to be built there was a chest freezer. Eddy would pluck the dead cockatoos and using fishing line he would suspend them near to the bottom of the chest freezer so that when they were completely frozen they would be able to stand there on the bottom on their own two feet. He would arrange them so that they looked like they were having some sort of naked parrot meeting. It was the most macabre sight you could imagine all these naked cockies standing around with their huge beaks sticking out made even bigger by their lack of feathers. When a traveller or some other visitor showed up Eddy would take great delight in asking them to come over for a look and then, when they were in position, he would with a flourish open the lid to expose twenty or so naked parrots just standing around there chilling. It just made his week every time some unknowing person looked into the freezer.
Colin and I were very close to Old Tony or “Old Tone” as he was generally known. Tony Evans was from Kenya where he had owned a beautiful four thousand acre wheat farm in the highlands. It was after the Mau Mau uprising when many of the British born farmers were forced to leave their farms, Tony was one such farmer. Initially he and his family left with just the clothes on their backs but later on he managed to get a small amount of money out of the country. Tony had gone from a king to a pauper in less than three months. This fact was brought home to him soon after he arrived in Australia when he got his first job as a farm labourer in Geraldton working on Eric Smarts farm. On his first day he was ordered to hop onto the back of the Ute with the rest of the aborigines, a far cry from his previous situation of having a staff of fifty “blacks” in Kenya. Tony was a natural born comic; he even looked the part being really tall and skinny as a bean pole. He walked with the top part of his body leaning forward slightly. He was also an International Harvester machinery man, same as Colin and I, so we became great friends in spite of Colin skin colour.
With the small amount of money he had managed to extract from Kenya he had purchased a farm at Dandaragan called Mardo. We both looked forward to shearing at Old Tone’s as he would regale us with wonderful colourful stories from his previous life. He would swear in Zulu when penning up the sheep and he was the only person I knew who walked with a limp due to a road accident when he hit a giraffe. Seems giraffes are hard to spot especially on a gravel road as they are a similar colour to the road, as well there are only four skinny legs to see with the rest of their body being elevated and out of sight of the driver. Tony held Crystal in high esteem and admired her efforts in shaping Waigani Farm. He thought of her as an equal unlike most of the other farmers in Dandaragan who either ignored her efforts totally or commented that she had done well for a woman which used to give her the total shits.Tony was popular and loved by us all.
Thoroughness was a word that did not exist in Tony’s way of life. He always seemed not to finish things off like the piers or supports under the shearing shed floor. When he built the floor he had been in a rush as usual and just jammed them under the bearers instead of digging them into the ground. The wool floor was made from rough cut timbers and the area around the wool table was particularly susceptible to collapse. When there was rain around Tony would put sheep under the wool floor, most farmers did the same in an effort to keep the wool dry for the shearers. All was OK until the sheep got some sort of fight and rushed about underneath a bit often crashing into the uprights and knocking them over, this caused the wool floor near the wool table to collapse. The wool piece pickers and whoever was classing the wool spent their day in nervous anticipation of a sudden collapse if the sheep were under the floor. Same could be said for the let-out pens Tony had never got around to putting sides on the down chutes where the shorn sheep went after they had been shorn to be counted out after every run. The sheep needed to walk the plank as the shed was quite elevated. If the sheep gave you any trouble like digging their horn into your ribs as you were shearing it then all you needed to do to get revenge was to give the sheep a slight bump to one side or the other as they began their run down the plank. This caused them to lose directional control somewhat steering too much to the left or right to end up in a heap beside the down plank.
Tony’s trucking efforts carting produce to Perth were legendry. His wife Pam always told me she would wave him off and would never know when he would show up again such were his adventures. His trucks were always old un-roadworthy bombs with crook brakes. He used to use fencing wire to hold down the bales of wool and would strain the wire up using his old wire strainers; on one occasion he borrowed his next door neighbour’s truck that had great brakes to cart a load of wool to Perth. At the first stop light in Midland he needed to apply the brakes in a hurry as a small VW had suddenly pulled up ahead of him. The brakes worked so well that half of the top layer of bales came off several of them landing on the unfortunate VW. Another time he was telling me he was in the trailer at the wheat silo and was shovelling the last of the grain out due to the fact that the home made tipping trailer would not tip up high enough. So there he was shovelling away and he told me “you know those bloody hydraulic over air hand brakes?” I said “Yeh” “Bloody unreliable” he said bloody often being his most used word. “well I was shovelling away thinking good thoughts and all of a sudden I noticed the bloody silo slowly moving past me which I though a bit bloody odd, then the thought slowly came to me that silos don’t normally move, it then suddenly sunk in that my bloody truck and trailer was the thing that was moving, not the silo. By the time I got myself together and climbed out of the trailer the whole bloody thing had jack-knifed and jammed itself hard up against the silo causing a huge traffic jam of trucks waiting to unload grain” Seems it took all afternoon to sort it all out.
Tony was always getting booked for one thing or another and on several occasions needed to abandon his truck and hitch hike home. He was always doing barter deals to get himself out of strife and would trade promises of future bales of hay for all sorts of favours like getting a friendly builder to reload wool bales or empty drums that had fallen off. On one occasion he had got out of a traffic infringement by discovering a traffic cop who was a horse enthusiastic. He was always hoping that it would be this particular fellow who would be the one to pull him up and a couple of promised bales of good quality oaten hay would smooth the waters. One day he was driving his old unregistered truck down a side road near his farm which was in the middle of nowhere when “bloody amazingly” he noticed the flashing blue light behind him. The cop just overtook him and pulled up in front not realizing Tony had no brakes. Unable to stop Tony did the next best thing to ovoid ramming the back of the cops car and over the table drain he went careering off into the bush. The cop obviously not too stupid, suspecting that the truck had no brakes walked through the flattened bush over to where Tony and his truck had finally come to a standstill. When Tony opened the door to get out the cop leaned in and pressed his hand down on the brake pedal which of course offered no resistance at all and went straight to the floor. Unfortunately the cop leaned his weight on the peddle and as his body followed his hand he received a nasty crack on his forehead against the instrument panel. At the trial Tony told the magistrate that the policeman had no authority to enter his cab and play with the brake pedal. Tony’s famous saying was “it was with some surprise your honour that I received this summons as I did explain in some detail to the officer the reasons why this incident occurred”.
Colin Moore, like Tony had a great sense of humour and both had an ability to remember jokes. Both would laugh so much in the telling of a joke that one often never reached the punch line such was their hysterical laughter. I lived with Tony and his family during shearing in their old stone house done by the creek. In the evenings after shearing we would sit on their wide wooden veranda sipping a glass of red wine whilst smelling the wood smoke from the fire burning under the home made hot water heater. This rich smell combined with the physical aftermath of the shearing and the damp taste of the wet grass and rotting vegetation in the creek with the evening mist gently settling will never leave me. It was a special time with the day almost finished, anticipating another great dinner cooked by Pam, sharing a Craven A filter tip with her, enjoying the warm company of Old Tony and Colin with Tony telling us yet another amazing story from Kenya about lion hunting and me looking forward to the book waiting in my room to read after dinner. These special times never last but they are worth millions to hold even for a brief moment in time. In spite of the colour of Colin skin and Tony’s recent experience with being thrown out of Kenya by the blacks he and Colin became very close mainly due to their shared sense of humour and their passion for International Harvester Machinery. Old Tony’s shearing was the very best and both Colin and I felt unreservedly welcome.
Colin was always referred to as“ he’s just like one of us, he’s is not like your normal Abo”. “ He is not like the others” he is a good bloke. Whereever we went he would quietly endure these racist comments. Shearing at the Esters, a new shed for us the wife, Elizabeth asked Colin about his nationally, “are your dark features Italian?” His answer was “I am an Australian”. An answer he could give more truthfully than most of those who insisted in referring to him as being just like one of us. It wasn’t until later in his life that he started to realize that he needn’t keep trying to be one of us and he started to discover his own identity. The Moora Hospital, the place that refused him a birth right offered him a position on their hospital board as the token aboriginal. He started commenting on the small presumptions that people made about people with dark skins. When he was in Royal Perth Hospital after suffering heart attack whilst shearing at Dandaragan many years later he made a comment to the staff members who had said that the two aboriginal kids who were pushing the hospital bed along were probably stealing it, Colin told the staff members that had the kids been white they would not have made those assumptions.
I had always gone along in life not really thinking about these issues apart from becoming pretty pissed if someone made some derogative comment about his aboriginally. I even remember as a young man growing up in Bendigo thinking that the idea of taking the aboriginal kids from their parent’s forcibility and having them brought up by white families was a great idea. I was sitting in the park near the Midland railway station in Perth with Colin one day and he for some reason he kept checking his pocket. He was wearing a suit at the time and had been to his solicitors in relation to his recent purchase of a farm. I asked him what he was doing and he told me that he was making sure he had ten dollars in his pocket as he could be arrested for vagrancy if he didn’t. It was then that it finally dawned on me what it must have been like living in Colin’s skin. Later on I also remember after my second son Nicholas was born did I finally entertain the thought of what it would be like if some sort of government official came and took Nicholas away against my wishes.
After years of working beside Colin and enjoying a special relationship with him and his family I finally gained some appreciation as to the destructive force of discrimination that existed, and still exists in our Australian community. I also realized also how great a man he was to have borne it all and still managed to think well of everybody. Colin died because he was an aboriginal. He was sent home too early from hospital and according to a close medical specialist friend of mine the treatment he received was quite deficient. Had he been white like me he would still probably be alive and I would still be able to call him up on the telephone and talk about stuff. Even now all these years later I put his photo which was taken at my wedding to Mary up on the fridge door which always brings back good memories. Every time I see a new cross on the roadside indicating another fatal car crash I remember Colin. When these crosses were starting to gain popularity he was jokingly against the idea as he reasoned that if you were driving along and noticed a new cross you would feel a bit sad and you could be distracted for a moment and this distraction could cause you to crash a bit further on into the bush than the cross that caused the distraction and so on, in this way he reckoned there would end up being a line of crosses that would go further and further into the bush.
I gave the homily at his funeral and I talked about the day Colin and two aboriginals from the Moora reserve were working at Kyanaba station cementing the let-out races at the shearing shed. One of the Roberts families, two young daughters were there and were sticking real close to Colin who was probably the blackest looking fellow of the three. He finally asked them why you are staying so close to me as he was having trouble screeding the concrete. “Mum told us not to go too close to the Aborigines!” they told him. It was the same Mum who was playing the organ in the small country church where the funeral service was taking place and she told me later she did not know where to hide when I was telling the story.
At Dandaragan a funeral was a social occasion where many the farmers and farm workers turned up for a day’s social outing. The attendance was a mark of how successful or unsuccessful you had been in the community. The little cemetery on the hill was several kilometres out of town and it was always a test of the deceased’s popularity as to the length of the line of cars going from the church to the cemetery. Such was the admiration and respect for Colin his funeral smashed all previous records with the cars almost stretching all the way from the church to the burial ground. It was also normal for the bereaved spouse and their family to receive letters from friends and well-wishers I remember getting twenty of so letters when Crystal died however Colin’s wife Pam needed five shoe boxes to store all the letters that arrived during the months after his death. There were hundreds of letters most of many pages such was the admiration and respect he had attracted during his life time. I mentioned as part of my speech at his funeral that it was not a matter of him being just like one of us, but of us being worthy and special enough to be just like one of him.
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Gyrocopters 