Arthur Upfield: Battling Prophet

This race has not entirely passed away. The last remnants are still to be found living in peaceful old age on the banks of inland rivers and near a township which they visit only onpensions days. It was a race the like of which will never again be seen, for it possessed all the admirable attributes and but few of the human vices. They were born long before motor traction could weaken their bodies and the craze for luxury and mental distraction could weaken their minds. Life made upon them such physical demands that occasional intemperance had no lasting effects, whilst their dependence on one another in a world of vast, semi-arid distances gave to them a spiritual strength rarely found in city and town even in their own times.

John Luton’s background applied only in part to Knocker Harris, a younger man, less intelligent, less stable. He had been brought up on a farm, whereas Mr. Luton had roamed the open spaces of the Interior. He had driven horses in a single-furrow plough, long after Mr. Luton had saved a little money from the pubs and purchased his first bullock team and wagon. Knocker Harris had prospected for gold in Victoria when Mr. Luton was punching bullocks on the far tracks of the Interior. But, like Mr. Luton, he had worked from dawn to dusk, and he had lived with those whose motto was: “If your neighbour needs a pound, give him five. If a down-and-out begs for a crust, give him half your loaf.” There was no sentiment about it. It was just plain common-sensicalinsurance.

Ben Wickham had been anewchum, atowny, an outsider lost in a rough man’s country. He was a full-grown man when Mr. Luton found him completely drunk on the wood-heap at the rear of a wayside hotel. The publican wanted Wickham away from his yard, and had no use for him in his bar, as he was broke to the wide, wide sky. Mr. Luton was conveying a mountain of stores and grog to far distant townships, and, the day before, he had left Broken Hill without his offsider, who had decided he couldn’t leave the bright gas-lights of Argent Street.

Wickham was, of course, no use whatever to Mr. Luton. He was wearing a flash city suit, horribly soiled, and shoes, instead of he-man’s boots. He had never seen a bullock yoke, and didn’t know which end a bullock hauled with. Mr. Luton took the body off the wood-heap, nursed life back into it, and ultimately fashioned the best offsider he ever had. Twelve months later, Ben Wickham was driving his own bullock team in company with John Luton.

They worked together for ten years. For ten years, summer and winter, they flogged and cursed bullocks up and down all the tracks of outback New South Wales and Queensland, loading wool to the railheads, loading stores and building material and beer and spirits back to the growing townships and the ever demanding station homesteads.

Wickham had been a brilliant student and promised to become a brilliant scientist, and, like so many brilliant minds, he had a weakness for alcohol. Mr. Luton picked him off the hotel wood-heap just in time. Forced abstinence and gruelling work on the tracks, aided byhis own intelligence and by Mr. Luton’s remarkable influence, slowly brought Wickham into a world he could appreciate. He had accepted and profited by Mr. Luton’s advice, which was: “Don’t nibble at the grog. Have a gut-fulwhen you’re at the trough, and then give it away for a spell.” It was sound advice, too, when the visit to the trough lasted two weeks and the spell following it lasted nine or twelve months.

The partnership was broken when Wickham inherited his father’s estate known as Mount Mario, at the time when the motor truck was banishing bullocks to the abattoirs. Mr. Luton decided to buy a small grazing property, and Wickham took up his inheritance and his meteorological ambitions. What Bony knew of him were tiny pen strokes which brought him into clear perspective in this large picture he was now studying.

That Wickham had been a truly remarkable man was unarguable. He broke away from the orthodox science of meteorology, which was getting nowhere very fast and could only advise my lady what clothes to wear the next day, the airman what conditions he could expect to fly into during the next two hours, and the seaman whose barometer and radio contact with other ships could tell him more.

Like Sister Kenny, he battled with obstruction, a professional jealousy and spite. From a low percentage of accurate forecasts, he had ultimately claimed accuracy of one hundred per cent, and the two years before his death had proved his claim. Without doubt, Ben Wickham had been greatly admired and greatly hated. Twenty thousand people watched the plane rise from the airfield with his ashes to scatter them over the place where he had worked and fought and triumphed.

There was, of course, part of the picture so exceedingly blurred as to be almost undecipherable. Mr. Luton’s idea, if it could be so named, thatevery spirituous liquor has its own distinct effect on the mind subject to its power-it could be accepted only as an idea, barely as a theory. Who on this earth, other than Mr. Luton, with the possible exception of Knocker Harris, would accept as fact that hallucinations created by whisky were distinctly different from those created by gin? Who else would be even faintly interested by this subject, this idea, this theory, this utter rot? A man aged seventy-five existed on gin and nothing else for three weeks. Of course he would have delirium tremens. What was more remarkable was that he didn’t die before reaching that stage. He had had a sick heart. The doctor had warned him.

And still Mr. Luton stood forth in the picture, clearly sane, mentally virile, without question speaking of something in which he believed and of the truth as he understood it. He had sent for Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that only one reared in and habituated to the bush could be expected to believe that Wickham had not died of too much gin.

Well, it would be something to exercise the mind while he was fishing, and there were ten days of fishing ahead, a leave long due and, in his own opinion, well deserved. Ah… Then Mr. Luton’s booming voice issued from the front door, calling him to dinner.

The kitchen was bright and warm, and Mr. Luton, wearing a cook’s apron, was serving fillets of fish, surrounded by crisp potatoes and garnished with lemons, from the Darling River. They discussed fish and fishing, when Bony learned that the Cowdry River was short and deep and wide, that it was not actually a river, although two streams entered it. In the long ago the sandstone cracked open to let in the sea and admit the kingfish, the flathead and the bream.

Cooking fish is an art distinct from cooking, and Mr. Luton was an artist. He certainly knew how to brew coffee, well laced with brandy.

“That was a truly satisfying meal,” Bony told him when they lazed at table, and the black-and-white cat stretched on the hearth footing the hot stove.

“Plain and good,” agreed his host. “You know, us old geezers in the old days lived on damper bread and meat, and nothing else except tomato sauce, black tea and pain-killer, and got along very well. Ben often trotted down here for a simple plain feed away from his own table, where only high-falutinmuck was fed to him. One morning he came in and said: ‘I’ve come down for a beer out of a tin pannikin. You got pint pannikins, haven’t you?’ “

“He liked everything plain?”

“Yes, took him back to the old days. In his own house he wasn’t the boss, you understand. His sister was and still is. Sour old bitch about sixty. Only one man ever got into bed with her and he dropped dead the next morning.

“Not that she didn’t run the big house all right. She always did that, the servants and all, including Ben when he was there. In the house he was a mouse. Outside he was a lion, and wouldn’t allow her or anyone to say how he should manage his office and his staff. Give herherdue, she always did believe he’d win out. She married a Parsloe, of Parsloe Jams, but, as I said, he couldn’t stand it and shuffled off. There’s others as well.”