Illywhacker

It was March and the shearers were on strike and if everyone in Melbourne and the bush knew about it, if they imagined gangs of shearers were burning down wool sheds and setting fire to the squatters' paddocks, it was news to Jack McGrath who travelled innocently beside his team in his faded red shirt, his moleskins, bowyangs, and heavy boots. He did not read the newspapers. He did not sit drinking around the campfire, telling yarns or singing songs.

When he found out he did not even know what a strike was and it was Dinny O'Hara who had to explain it to him. O'Hara was a huge man, withered with age, whose enormous cauliflower ears dominated his blotchy face.

"The shearers is on strike," he spat.

"What's a strike, Mr O'Hara?"

"A strike is when the buggers won't work," he spat again. "So we got no wool to carry. The Fergusons got no wool. The Rosses got no wool. The McCorkells got no wool. It's all on the sheep, not in the bale, and there'll be bloody war before there is."

They sat on the back veranda. Jack McGrath stared at Dinny O'Hara. He had never heard of such a thing. "A war."

"A war, a bloody war, that's what they want", O'Hara said, "and that's what they'll get. Boozers and bushrangers", he said, "galloping around with their guns and their speeches. So I'm giving you the sack."

Jack didn't say anything. He remembered breaking a gum twig in half and then in half again. He threw the pieces of broken twig on the ground. He could not understand the justice of it. He was so used to being liked by men. His eyes were suddenly, surprisingly, wet with tears and he turned his head into the shade of the veranda on the pretext of finding something amiss with his kangaroo-hide belt.

"I hear tell," O'Hara said, "there's a fella in Point's Point with a team doing work with the timber. His driver got kilt, run over by his own wheel, the silly bugger."

They didn't shake hands. Young Jack McGrath rolled his swag and started walking the sixty miles to Point's Point. He walked through the bush all night and all the next day. He sang hymns as he walked, not because he was deeply religious, but because they were the only songs he knew. He walked for twenty-four hours and stopped, dead beat, three miles short of Point's Point. He unrolled his swag and slept beneath the bridge at Gaffney's Creek.

The next day he found there was no job and no one had been run over by a wheel. He walked up to the gold mine to try and get work but there wasn't any. The manager of the mine was an Englishman known locally as Twopence Thompson, a name that related to his cunning in money matters.

Twopence Thompson's problem was a thirty-six-ton steam boiler that a previous contractor had abandoned sixteen miles away on the mountain road to Point's Point. He offered Jack McGrath two hundred pounds to bring it into the mine and whether from desperation or a rare fit of generosity, advanced half of the money to enable Jack to buy a team.

The opinion of the town was that they were both fools, Jack for accepting the job and Twopence Thompson for parting with his cash.

Jack McGrath chose his team, paying forty pounds each for good polers and ten pounds each for the rest of the team. He made the yokes from Queensland brush box and spent two weeks rigging together a new harness. Then he walked sixteen miles to the abandoned boiler and studied it. Where the other contractor had tried to pull the thirty-six tons uphill, Jack worked out a series of pullies so his team could move downhill. He anchored the pullies to giant bluegums and began the job. It took him three months. Sometimes he was bogged for a week. At other times he moved it a hundred yards. But move it he did, and Twopence Thompson parted with his other hundred pounds.

His luck had started. He had a good team and he was well respected. He worked in the timber and had he wished he could have drunk himself to death on French champagne as plenty of bullockies had done before him.

He banked his money. There was nothing he wanted to spend it on.

When, in 1910, he bought the charabanc he was thought insane and then shrewd. In his opinion, he'd been neither. He'd been lucky. The gold mine was working hard by then and there was plenty of money in the little town. He took his share of it: running sober miners down to Warburton and bringing drunken ones back.

Ten years later, on the road to Colac, he could still smile about those days. By God it had been fun. He'd driven that Ford, the first of its kind in Victoria, around those winding mountain tracks, stopping every mile or so for men to empty their bladders or settle disputes which were often funnier than the arguments that had begun them. And coming back after a big storm! That was the go. The road blocked by fallen trees. How he had loved shifting them.

They called him "Jack the Gelly" in Point's Point.