The Passing of Jones by Bungarra

THE PASSING OF JONES
by Bungarra

Jones was a friend of mine!!   In all fairness, I must state, however, that the connection was not of my own seeking. Like poverty, subpoenas, and subscription lists, it was thrust upon me. The first time I met Jones was on the Bungarra track at the tail end of a wagon loaded with tucker and swags. There were twenty men chasing that vehicle, one behind the other in Indian file, strung out along the beaten strip between the sandy wheel ruts where the horses walk. Jones was the last joint but one in that tail, I was the last joint myself.  The men in front had all been there before. It was no hardship to them to trudge their twenty miles in the hot sun. While every hidden stump along the road was marked by a volley of ‘Australian adjectives’ of full flavor and good body, Jones stubbed his tired toe and said merely ‘ Oh dear,’ or perhaps if it was the toe with the water blister on it ‘Dear me.’ With the others, when their brows were wet with honest sweat and the quarts and long in sleevers of shy poo, shandygaff, snake juice, and the liquid abominations of long weeks spent in public bars, oozed through every pore, Jones shed tea and lemonade only, and he called it ‘perspiration’, the word ‘sweat’ being distinctly vulgar except when applied biblically, which didn’t count.

The New Chum – The Bulletin 19 Nov 1892

At night when tea was over and the empty tins slung to one side, and the teamster had finished currying his horses and had joined the circle round the campfire, swapping lies about impossible nuggets, and conjuring up memories of old mates mutually known to one another, Jones would crawl away quietly by himself and drawing out a pocket book would open and read by the flickering light the cherished letters and the good advice a young man always gets when he starts down the thorny path of life for himself— and never follows. Then he said his prayers and turned in with a sigh, while the other fellows sought in their swags for the flask concealed to taper off on, and furtively took a good pull at it before cursing the blamed pebbles and sticks under the blankets they slept on.

Three days had passed and we had not spoken. Jones had eyed me often and wished we had had an introduction before starting, but on the fourth morning out he came over to me while the billies were boiling for breakfast and said with some show of hesitation, ‘Er—excuse me—er—have you got any pomatum you could lend me ?’ ‘No’ I replied, thinking he wanted to lubricate his blistered feet, ‘the teamster has some axle grease he might lend you.’ ‘ Thank you,’ Jones remarked sadly, it would hardly do. You see it is Sunday morning, and I always do my hair on Sunday.’ Then he added, ‘I see the teamster fetching his horses, surely they don’t travel on Sunday. I thought we would camp and hold a service.’

Now there was in the crowd a parchment-faced, beetle-browed fossicker, known colloquially as ‘Paddy the Preacher,’ from the fact that in one of the intervals that ensued after he had got out of jail and before he had got in again, he had joined ‘The Salvation Army’ and thumped a drum, the extent of his musical capacity, for a week or two till the fumes of his last debauch had evaporated and his intelligence had supervened enough to tell him there was ‘nothing in it.’ So he left the Army and cast about him for another occupation. He decided to try the Civil Service and get into the post office. But they caught him,— he was ‘getting into’ that Department through the window — and he was convicted. Paddy had seen better days, he had once essayed to start in business for himself, he had opened a store — with a crowbar and a jimmy— but the public had not responded while the police had. Now he was about to try his luck at the new diggings.

‘Honesty is the best policy he would often say, adding sagely, ‘I know, because I’ve tried both.’

Just at this moment, Paddy was wrapping his long linen Prince Alberts I round what he called ‘his hoofs,’ and I referred Jones to him as an authority on religious subjects. When I looked up again from rolling up my swag, I perceived quite a little crowd around the pair of them. Paddy was explaining, ‘Blamed if he ain’t right boys. Let’s camp for a day and ave a blanky service. Come on Pete, you’re ‘orses want a spell, turn ’em out again.’

Pete was willing, and so were the boys generally, so we sat on our swags and had a friendly chat over details. Ideas on the conduct of Sunday services seemed vague and somewhat involved. Suggestions came in thick and fast, notwithstanding, from the conclave of swags. I votes that Jim Maloney and Long Mick be umpires and Mr. Jones acts as referee,’ suggested Flash Joe, a third-rate Sydney pugilist of shady antecedents. ‘This ain’t no sparring match,’ corrected the man on the striped bluey, this is a gate money affair, we’ve got to appoint a treasurer.’

A pained expression crept over Jones’s face and he stood up and said ‘Gentlemen, I don’t quite catch the drift of your remarks. I think you must belong to different denominations to me. Perhaps Mr.—er—Mr.—er—Pady the Preacher would explain how we can conduct the—er—service.’ Paddy jumped up off his swag and marched into the middle of the ring. The old Army instinct was upon him. He threw his cap down on the ground, spat on his hands, loosened the red kerchief off his throat, and waved it aloft. Then he began:—

Never mind denominations, as he calls it, boys. ‘I ain’t got any denomination myself. My father was an Episco-blanky-palian, and my mother was a Presb blanky-terian, and I was brought up by the ‘air of my ed as a Cala-blanky-thumpian myself but I wouldn’t ‘ave none of ’em, not I. I was a lost sheep, a regular goat, and slid along the pathway of sin like a long sleever of shypoo down a thirsty maws throat on a hot day. Yes, my friends, I’ve had sin for breakfast, sin for dinner and more sin for tea, till I was chock-a-block up to the nock with sin and couldn’t hold no more. My back teeth were under and the sin was running out o’ my ears. Like a drowning man, I sniffed the battle from afar and plunged into the ocean of wickedness, but it’s a long worm that has no turn-

When I’d done my  three months and got out into the bright sunshine again the army sister says to me, “come on to the barracks and get some ot tea inside you and sin no more.” And when I got to the barracks I get some tea, and a brother says to me, “Hallelujah, ‘ave a bun, and I joins the Army forthwith. But I was tempted and nearly backslid. The captain comes along by and by, and he says “Hallelujah, brother, chop some wood.” And the devil he whispers to me, “Stoush the bloke on the jaw,” but the good spirit whispers in the other ear, “You blanky well get up and chop the wood,” and I did it. By and by I got promoted to pounding the drum, and my oath I thumped it.

It’s a glorious thing to be saved, brothers.

I’ll give you a hymn if I can think of it, and I want you all to join in the chorus. I’ve forgotten the tune, but ‘ere goes. Chip in, boys. We’re marching on to war. We are, we are, we are, We care not what the people say or what they think we are,” Paddy waved his red handkerchief and everyone tried to follow him, but the words got mixed and the tune involved till, without knowing exactly how, the crowd found itself, like one man, rolling out the chorus ” Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do ” which did not, somehow, seem to fit in with either the occasion or the sentiments expressed by the late speaker, especially when we all ended up with the words “on a bicycle built for two.”

The expression on Jones’ face that had appeared puzzled throughout now gave place to absolute dismay. Paddy the Preacher started to remonstrate when Long Mick shouted — Let’s have a collection boys, you can’t have a service without a collection, that’s all I know about churches, and there’s a shanty we pass tomorrow where we’ll blow the proceeds,” and he started by throwing a bob into his cap. The shouting had startled the horses at the wagon where they were tied up feeding, and two or three of them got badly tangled up. Pete, the teamster, sprang to his feet and in a moment the air was thick with curses, as he cracked his whip and sailed round the wagon breathing rum and blasphemy, howling sulfurous oaths such as only a Westralian teamster can emit with mingled grace and elegance that drowned all other voices and effectually bust up that camp meeting beyond the hope at least for that happy Sabbath day at all events.

The next, day we reached the shanty at about noon. It was the usual contraption of bush timber and galvanised iron and the liquor dispensed was also of the usual bush variety,

two murders and a dog fight in each bottle.

The boss of the shanty was dead, to the world on the chaff bags in the lean-to after the passing of a train and party of swagsmen two days previous. His better half — better in so far that she could hold more whisky without swaying from the perpendicular — did the honors. She was certainly not fair, but she was fat and considerably forty, and she held her end up round after round with the aplomb and careless ease of a casehardened dry-blower. The whole gamut was run.

There was singing whisky, crying whisky, and praying whisky,

and the boys got it all in turn. The fighting whisky had been consumed entirely by a bagman and a toff who went through on the coach. There, had been a falling-out and a fight, and part of the toff’s ear was inside the stomach of Bully, the terrier pup, who had taken a lively part in the scuffle and was now sneaking round in the hope of another fight.

Whilst the boys were drawing an overdraft on nature inside the shanty, Jones was writing a long letter home on the back of his hat, seated in the shade of the wagon. Jones was young and inexperienced and the letter was descriptive and moral. About 4 o’clock in the afternoon Pete, the teamster, pulled out for the next water hole, some four miles ahead up the track. In vain the voice of the shanty-keeper’s wife induced him to stay. ‘What’s your blooming hurry,’ she urged. ‘I’ll cook you a bite of supper presently. But Pete had been there before and wasn’t having any, and he knew, too, that the Sunday collection money had all been pretty well blown long ago. So he shouted to the boys, whipped up his patient team, and gee-hawed up the track to the well. Four of the passengers clutched the ends of ropes behind the wagon and staggered forward, lurching painfully along the wheel ruts. A fifth with his hat clutched tight in the other hand, and he reeled along without the fear of losing the wagon.

The rest of the cavalcade were strung out along the dusty road for over a mile or more behind, singing and shouting, sometimes tripping over a root and getting on their feet again and sometimes continuing the journey on all fours. Long after the well was reached and the sun had set they continued to arrive singly or in couples, and slept just where they dropped. Jones made down his bed a hundred yards away under a mulga bush, keeping well to himself. It was a new phase of camp life that appalled him. For the next two days, the distance travelled was small, and the words were spoken less. A feeling of depression with a decided leaning to cynicism and suicide had replaced the wild exhilaration of the whiskey-heated blood that had surged through so many brains down at the shanty. Only the shanty keeper and his wife never felt this maudlin depression; it arrived in due course but was promptly suppressed by drowning at the earliest stage of its existence, the stack of empty bottles in the backyard growing larger meanwhile.

Jones pursued the even tenor of his way and after completing our two hundred miles of tramping over rocks, dead timber, and hot sand, arrived at the settlement of Bungarra one morning before dinner time with an expression like a brick wall and a heart of lead. His glorious visions of mining camps with their wealth of slugs and nuggets, their streets of golden stone, and their prosperous miners had already resolved itself into a heterogeneous collection of mud hut structures, bush humpies, and galvanised iron anomalies, the residents into gaunt, weather-beaten earth delvers dressed mostly in rags, and the general air of the place into a slough-of despond alike distressing to the feelings and repellant to the eye. Jones wiped an unbidden tear away and sought the consolations of religion, from which he arose with loins girded up for the battle of life.  I left Jones just now, borrowed some dishes, and staked out a claim as a stop-gap for the tucker bill.

Two years passed away. Years of heat and hard graft, bad tucker and worse water.

One morning I had the occasion to walk from the claim into the township to procure some canvas to mend my water bags, now rusted out pretty well by magnesia, alkali, and other products of the public well. Having some time to spare I wandered into that ‘cemetery of spare time’, the Warden’s Court, where two grave and reverend seigneurs were seated on the bench, both quite sober as becomes J P’s as and their awful dignity. A man had just entered the dock. He had his back towards me and I could not so much as get a glimpse of his face, but from his tattered shirt, coatless, tangled hair, and a general air of dilapidation, it was evident that he was a hard case. A name was given and a charge read. The name was ‘Jones’, the charge being drunkenness, obscene language, and assaulting the police. It came out in the constable’s evidence that the prisoner was an incorrigible vagabond and ne’e r do well, that his language was lurid and Westralian to such a degree as to paralyse a case-hardened dry blower. His support came in remittances intermittently, aided by loans, casual borrowings, snowballing, attending drunken citizens’ home, the remnants of a badly shattered credit, and lining up at the bar under invitation or without it.

Previous convictions filled half one side of a sheet of foolscap. Extenuating circumstances included descent from a good family (a rapid descent in fact), religious early training, and college education, each and all of which on a new goldfield is a sufficient cause for going literally to the devil, seeds sown on the ground that brings forth weeds and thistles abundantly. The Bench, swayed by its chance of purging society with which it never mixed—while on the board—of elements of discord and danger, unanimously decided that six months of hard labour would meet the case. And there I sat with the memories of an arduous trip up country two years previously thick upon me, I realised

Jones had passed out of my life forever!

Recommended reading:   Into The West  edited by Chris Holyday – from Hesperian Press

The Western Australian goldrushes of the 1890’s witnessed the first major encounter between Australians West and East. Henry Lawson led the charge of writers who came West. This book showcases those writers and some of their works in what was a little-known period of great literary activity that would prove significant for both Western Australia and Australia.

Generously illustrated and featuring stories and verse by Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, Albert Facey, Andree Hayward (Viator), George Hope (Bungarra), EG Murphy (Dryblower), JP Bourke (Bluebush), TH Wilson (Crosscut), FW Ophel (Prospect Good), Ben Strange, LB Jupp, and JK Ewers. In addition to works by these writers, a number of short stories have been included by anonymous Western Australian-based writers – there are 21 short stories/sketches in all and over 35 poems included in this collection. Mainly chosen for their spark of humour and irony, their appeal remains timeless. Many stories appear for the first time in book form, having been rescued from newspapers and periodicals of the times.

The book provides a rare insight into our Western Australian literary development and celebrates our pioneering writers in the 40 years from Goldrushes to Great Depression.