Old Days, Old Ways
Alex Nicol is a writer and broadcaster. He began his career with the ABC in 1967 as a trainee rural reporter. Two years later he became the producer and presenter of the national radio program All Ways on Sunday and later became the manager of ABC Orange.
He has worked as a jackeroo, as a sheep and wool officer for the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, as an agriculture college lecturer, and as the media liaison officer with the Australian Wheat Board.
Alex is also a playwright, and his plays have been produced in London, New York, Melbourne and Sydney, with credits including an award at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester’s International Writing Competition, the Wal Cherry Award, and The London International Playwriting Award. His play Three Toe Scratch was shortlisted for the Sydney Theatre Company’s Patrick White Award.
First published in 2019
Copyright © Alex Nicol 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
ISBN 978 1 76052 849 2
eISBN 978 1 76087 077 5
Internal design by Bookhouse, Sydney
Set by Bookhouse, Sydney
Cover design: Luke Causby/Blue Cork
Cover images: Victor Wright/Fairfax Media (Bathurst, 1955) and Herfort/Fairfax Media (Broken Hill, 1944)
This book is dedicated to my wife, Diana. Like so many women of her generation she sacrificed her career to follow her husband. So many times while I was being feted as a ‘star’ she was at home busy raising our family.
CONTENTS
Welcome to the Family
Dear Old M
The First Time
Touch and Go
Technician Magic
Shindy’s
The Fabulous Four
Spud Lumping
Who You Know
Around the West
Burrumbuttock Brekkie
Black Beauty
Carinda Curry
The Grazier’s New Wife
Dunlop
They’re Racing
A Parting Gift
Water War
Sleeper Cutters
Tiny’s Dead!
Pooncarie Stopover
Driving with Miss Muriel
Someone Must Care
Troubles at the Chook House
All Ways on Sunday
Give Me a Head of …
Golden Memories
The Lights of Cobb & Co.
Chinese Gold
Harbourmaster
Bush Pilots
Broken Blade
Our Henley
Man with Mule
Lightning Fast
Jimmy Hereen
Ted Egan
Old Broome
Mareeba Rodeo
Never Say Never …
Something Old, Something New
Film Star
The Coffin
Step Back in Time
Cooktown Cemetery
Rum Does for Lasseter
A Land Fit for Heroes
The Gloucester Tree
The Brewer’s Tale
The Hill
The Lithgow Flash
The Possum
The Dedicated Wharfie
Two Splendid Fish
Gift Collection
They’re Off!
The Rock
A Very Old-timer
Anakie
Breakfast at Alice
Camel Cup
A Near Thing
The Great Australian Funny Bone
The Search Goes on …
Rusty
Military Conflict
Old Mick
The Auctioneer
The Milky Bar Fairy
The Right Thing
Best on Show
The Doc
The Dogger
A Rush of Blood
The Demo Satellite Dish
The Ridge
Broadcasting on the Move
A Punchy Interview
Rain and Power
The Bluey
President Bush
On the Outer
The Times They Are a-Changin’
Let’s Drink to the Next Man to Die
They’re Growing Wheat at Mount Hope
Country Football’s Gone to Buggery
Acknowledgements
Photo Credits
WELCOME TO THE FAMILY
2CR was one of five huge transmitters that the government of the day set up in the 1930s to ‘cover Australia’. And they very nearly did.
Corowa in southern New South Wales, Rockhampton on the coast in Queensland, and Crystal Brook in outback South Australia came on stream in 1932. 2CR, with her transmitter at Cumnock, in the centre of New South Wales, followed five years later. Her powerful signal meant that broadcasts from the studio in Orange could be heard as far north as the Queensland border and as far south as Victoria. The old girl had a big family.
I arrived at the station in 1967, a very raw trainee rural reporter. She saw me grow to present a three-and-a-half-hour national program from her transmitter, and eventually to become manager at a time when technology was changing and we were no longer in awe of that big stick out at Cumnock.
There were flowers in the house when we arrived. Irene Hatswell saw to that. Welcome to the family.
Neil Inall would teach me. He sat me in a ‘dead studio’. I’ve never been comfortable with switches and dials, and what was in front of me terrified me. ‘Talk to the microphone as a friend,’ was his advice. ‘You’re not talking to people at a meeting; you’re having a chat with a mate. And practise, practise, practise.
‘Did you wash under your arms in the shower this morning? Of course you did, but you don’t remember, do you? No. It’s second nature. That’s the way handling those switches and dials will become. They mustn’t get in the way.’
I disappointed him so many times.
I am on my own controlling the breakfast session for the first time.
Think it through, I tell myself. Listen for the time call from Sydney, fade down the signal from Sydney, fade up our transmitter, open the microphone, make my announcements, close the microphone, fade up the control on the tape recorder that has this morning’s interview.
That’s not hard. But why isn’t the interview going to air? Don’t panic. Open the microphone and call the time. Press the start button on the recorder again. Why won’t the interview go to air?
Very quietly the studio door opens. Pat Britten crosses noiselessly to the desk. He reaches over, closes the microphone, turns the tape recorder on, gives me an encouraging smile and says, ‘Try again.’
It’s got to be like washing your armpits.
Neil and I divided the territory. He’d take the stories west of Dubbo, I’d take the eastern half of the region, and we would travel. Oh, how we would travel. There was no such thing as a recorded telephone interview. If you wanted to talk with someone, then you drove and you met them face to face. We were often away from family overnight, over nights.
I’d been with the ABC for perhaps six months, at 2CR for perhaps three months, but when I got back to the studio the manager sat me down. ‘You’re going to need some time off. Don’t worry about that. Take as much as you need.’ He opened the safe. ‘And you’ll need some money.’ He handed some over. ‘We’ll work it out later.’
Welcome to the family.
2CR’s transmitter at Cumnock. The old lady was meant to cover one-fifth of Australia.
DEAR OLD M
Each morning when I came into the studio, on my desk would be a neat pile of copy paper. At the top of the first page I would see the typed words: ‘This is the news, written by Laurie Mulhall, read by …’ Dear Old M claimed authorship, and you had better do his words justice. The copy was there in plenty of time for me to read it, reread it aloud and get it right.
Laurie Mulhall—Dear Old M—was a masterful journalist with a poetic turn of phrase. On slow news days I would announce to our listeners, ‘Following last week’s rain, green shoots of new life spike the rich earth of the wheat country of the Central West.’ You wouldn’t get that in the Tele.
Dear Old M, our journalist in charge, was something of a father figure. He was ‘Dear Old’ because no matter who he was referring to, they became ‘Dear Old’. Hence Neil Inall was ‘Dear Old I’ and Colin Munroe, who’d done time at the station as a rural reporter, was ‘Dear Old Bangers and Mash’.
He’d sit in the newsroom, headphones clamped to his head and, in the early days, a pipe smouldering beside him. He had a marvellous habit of tap, tapping on the space bar of his typewriter as he encouraged the story out of whichever of our far-flung correspondents was on the phone. He didn’t take notes; he crafted the story as it was being told to him so that clean copy was the inevitable result.
Dear Old M, Laurie Mulhall second from the left, part poet… ‘Following last week’s rain green shoots of new life spike the rich earth of the wheat country of the Central West’ … master journalist.
Mrs Mac was our Trangie correspondent and a story in her own right. The wife of the local doctor—who’d come to town as a locum and, in Saturday Evening Post style, just stayed—she was known by, and knew, everyone for a hundred miles around.
I listened in horrified fascination once as she reported on a gruesome local accident.
‘Two boys, Mrs Mac?’ asked Dear Old M. Tap, tap, tap. ‘And they drove under the fence?’ he repeated. Tap, tap. ‘And the windscreen was down? … Oh, it was a jeep. There wasn’t any windscreen?’ Tap. ‘Oh, that’s good, Mrs Mac … And it what? Cut one boy’s head off? Right off?’ Tap, tap, tap. ‘Actually decapitated him? Oh, that’s good, Mrs Mac, that’s good. It was barbed wire? Oh, good, good.’
Getting accurate, sympathetic copy from a conversation like that is a rare skill.
Only a graded journalist was permitted to write the news copy, but 2CR had a big area to cover, and on more than one occasion a major national story meant that it was all hands to the pump.
There’d been a mine disaster at Cobar, and head office rang to suggest that someone should pop out to cover the story. It was a lazy 530 miles there and back; those were the days before they would ‘chopper’ someone to cover a dog fight. Besides, there were other stories to be covered, so we wouldn’t be doing that.
I asked if I could help. M was trying to raise the mine management and told me to get onto our Cobar correspondent, stay on the phone and get anything I could. Our correspondent was, often as not, a local housewife with an interest in seeing that her town got its share of news, and that was the case at Cobar. They certainly weren’t going to make a fortune selling news tips to the ABC.
I rang. At the other end the receiver was jerked off its cradle and a voice snarled, ‘Who’s that?’
I introduced myself and was met with: ‘You ought to have more sense. Blue Hills is on.’ Crash.
I should say that someone was supposed to keep an ear to the daily broadcast of the hugely popular rural drama Blue Hills. Inevitably, someone who’d missed the show would ring after lunch to be brought up to date with the goings on at Tanimbla. Get your perspective right, boy!
When M or his assistant took leave, they’d be replaced by a Sydney-based reporter who, wasn’t thrilled at the opportunity to work in the bush. Obviously, they had no personal knowledge of the district, and that could lead to some accidental misreporting. Diplomatic handling was required.
‘Sixteen feet of water covered the Bedgerabong Road.’ I read. If there was sixteen feet of water over any road on the flat plains of the Central West, it was already too late for Noah to get involved. ‘Er, perhaps sixteen inches?’ I suggested.
‘Feet. Definitely feet.’ Was the response.
So I fudged a bit.
Came a day when M was ill and there was no replacement. What was the alternative? No news?
I hesitantly asked if he would trust me to put out a bulletin and got his blessing. I knew he’d be listening from his sickbed and I was proud of my effort.
When he returned, he chided me. ‘What happened to the urn story, Nic?’
The CWA branch in one of our tiniest towns had raised the money to buy a new urn, and the fact had been dutifully reported by our correspondent.
‘There wasn’t room for it, M.’
‘What, not four lines?’ he insisted.
‘Really, M. It’s not much of a story,’ was my best excuse.
‘To you, Nic. Not to them.’
THE FIRST TIME
You never forget the first time, especially if it was a disaster. Nineteen sixty-nine was a very good year for red wine, and Australia was in the early stages of its love affair with the grape. It had been a long and difficult courtship.
There had been some early romances. Those German vine dressers came by special invitation of the South Australian government. The boardrooms of England decreed the building of mini chateaus (very mini) in northern Victoria, and Colin Campbell—of Rutherglen fame—told me that time was when the local winemakers would load a keg on the back of a cart and sell their produce by the billy-full to the local goldminers cooking Sunday lunch over their campfires.
Even our boys had done their bit. Don’t tell me that ‘plonk’ isn’t the result of some blushing, tongue-tied young Anzac trying to order vin blanc from a comely maid, but the wine had gone sour.
Wine bars were dark, gloomy places frequented by the flotsam of society in search of fourpenny dark, and those English gentlemen grew tired of the robust colonial reds … calling it ‘Emu wine’ probably wasn’t the smartest marketing strategy. Australian table wine was on the nose; only the strong survived.
Jack Roth was a survivor. The name says it all. Jack’s antecedents were those pioneering German winemakers looking for the right side of the hill to plant their vines in Australia, and they chose Mudgee. I jackerooed at Mudgee. I married a Mudgee girl from an old Mudgee family. I knew Jack and Jack knew me. He would be my first interviewee in my new profession of rural journalism.
It seems sacrilegious to say it now, but Jack was surviving by selling his grapes as table grapes. But he had an ace in the hole: he made rummy port. He matured his port in rum barrels. The result was unique. It was famous and it was good. I’d have Jack tell me the secret of rummy port.
This was my first interview and I was very careful. Recorder level was checked and rechecked before I began the interview with ‘Mr Roth’. Naturally, we were in the cellars; equally naturally, Mr Roth was at pains to demonstrate his techniques as the interview progressed.
‘These were the barrels. They came from America,’ said Mr Roth. ‘Here, try this.’ And he handed me a generous glass of fi
rst-year-in-the-barrel wine. ‘It was a mistake. I wanted the traditional brandy casks.’
This was great stuff. I checked that the tape was still recording … Yes, everything looked fine.
Mr Roth and I sat beside one of those barrels and sipped the contents as we chatted.
‘It’s the time the wine stands in the casks that makes the difference,’ I was assured. ‘Now, this has been down for a couple of years. Try this.’
We moved to a new cask and took up station there. The sipping and the discussion of techniques grew animated. ‘Mr Roth’ vanished, his place taken by ‘Jack’, and the secrets of the winemaker’s craft began to flow as freely as the rummy port.
I distinctly remember—at least, I think I do—deciding that I’d better put another tape on the recorder. This stuff was too good to miss.
Jack and I eventually parted the best of friends, with me promising solemnly that I’d call him with the date and time of this magnificent broadcast. He handed me a bottle of the best rummy port—‘a gift for Diana’.
The drive from Mudgee to Orange has never been easy, but the return trip on this occasion was particularly difficult.
Recording an interview is one thing; editing it to make a program is a different tipple altogether. I sat down faced with the prospect of turning an hour of interview into a five-minute broadcast.
Only then did I discover that something was amiss.
The longer the interview went, the stranger the voices seemed. By what can only have been some curious fault in the recorder, consonants and vowels collided with each other, making the speech hopelessly blurred.
This was a tragedy! My first interview with the ABC, a groundbreaking exposé of the secrets of rummy port, was ruined because of a technical failure. What was I going to tell ‘Mr Roth’?
TOUCH AND GO
The autumn was wet, very wet. The country had been worked up, but unless the rain stopped, we weren’t going to get the wheat crop sown. You just couldn’t get a tractor and machinery onto the ground. That great rain would be wasted.