Peter Carey - Illywhacker

The battle was not planned in advance and started quite by chance. We were carrying a swag of rosellas down to Melbourne and stopped, somewhere between Maldon and Ben-digo, to inquire directions from a group of bagmen who were milling around the railway line. They were trying to get up to Shepparton to pick fruit. Fifty yards up the line I could see the cause of the blockage – there were half a dozen railway police leaning against a siding platform. They leant like men in a bar, sticking out their potato bellies.

There was a communist amongst the bagmen. He had got up a deputation and had conferences, but with no useful result -the Johns had sworn to massacre the swaggies if they jumped the rattler. The men were now in disarray, some for fighting, some for staying, some for walking into Maldon to get the dole there.

What I did was not done like a nice man. It was done with spit on my shoe, swagger in my walk, a nasty glint in my eye, a charming smile on my face. As I walked up that railway track to talk to the bully boys I was my father's son. I had a vision of myself that sunny morning as I had not had a vision of myself for years: I couldsee Herbert Badgery again. I was delighted to hear the crunch of railway gravel. I was pleased my shoes were spit-bright, my handsome head newly shaved. I adopted the bearing of a brigadier and swung the silver-topped cane I used in my act as an idiot. I could feel Leah's eyes (wet, bright, big) boring into my broad straight back, but I was not doing this for her admiration. I was doing it for my own.

I tipped my Akubra to the gentlemen in blue who hung around the siding drinking tea from their thermos. They had, of course, observed me speaking with their enemies, but they had also witnessed my walk towards them (need I stress, again, the importance of the correct approach to walking?). They were uncertain as to how to take me. Perhaps they brought me an inspector in disguise and they offered me tea and gave up the rest of their soiled lumpy sugar when I demanded it.

I was, by then, an accomplished Thespian; I understood the value of silence on a stage, how it can be used to induce suspense, and then hysteria. I used a long cloak of silence to examine them. The smallest one was the most dangerous. He was none other than John Oliver O'Dowd, the same who was later responsible for Izzie's misfortune at Albury, a bully of a rare and dedicated sort, short, broad-shouldered, small-eyed, a type often mistaken for homosexual by people trying to explain the odd seepings of sentimentality in that otherwise impassive, excessively masculine face.

The others were bully boys to be sure, all leaning towards one another for support, thick-necked, broad-armed followers of orders, and my game made them edgy and uncertain. John Oliver O'Dowd was a good ten years older than his "bhoys" and it was to him that I addressed my remarks. I informed him of the numbers of men who waited on the track and said they only wished lawful work in the orchards, that they would be using carriages intended for animals already slaughtered or still in the fields, that they would be causing no financial loss to state or individual enterprise and that, if John Oliver O'Dowd should turn his official back, then these presently useless men might get on with producing wealth for the benefit of the state.

I spoke to him nicely. I could have sold him a Ford or a cannon. I did not permit him easily to hate me. I stroked the bastard like a trout until my demands made him turn, reluctantly, from me.

"All very decent, Mr Badgery," O'Dowd said at last (carefully, carefully). He pulled a hair from his nose and gazed at it a second. "I dare say. But we are policemen and we have our orders and intend to obey them."

His zombies dragged their heels through gravel, intent on underlining their boss's remarks.

"If you obey your orders, Mr O'Dowd, I will drill these men for half a day and then I shall march up here and we will go through you lot like a hot knife", I smiled, "through a block of lard." I made myselflike him as I spoke to him. And liking him, of course, was more than half of it, to understand why this miserable O'Dowd with his short arms and thick wrists should be the animal he was, to imagine his miserable cot, his nights beneath hessian bags sewed into quilts, his early frosty mornings, his loveless dusks, his unbending father, his withered disappointed mother. You cannot fake this affection, and O'Dowd knew, in the very moment I threatened him, that I alsoliked him. It weakened him horribly.

"That's as may be," he said, smiling himself.

"As will be."

"Come, Mr Badgery, those buggers is all commos."

"Have you not heard of me?" I inquired, spitting out my tea-leaves daintily at his feet. He shifted a boot sideways just in time.

"Can't say I have."

"You would be familiar with the International Workers of the World?" Oh, what pleasure it was to counterfeit this belief, this membership, to see his small eyes blink at my lovely, shiny lie.

"You're not a Wobbly?"

"I'm a human being, sir, and you won't be permitted to treat these men as animals." I drew myself up taller. I gave a beautiful account of my career with the Wobblies. In a brief circuit I visited Chicago and Perth. "Write it down if you must," I told the fair-haired galoot who was making earnest notes of my confession. "Do a fair draft and I will sign it."

O'Dowd snatched away the notebook before his man made a fool of himself.

"All right?" I asked O'Dowd. He did not answer. "I'm giving you mugs half an hour to make up your mind. If you haven't given us reason to change our minds, we'll come down here and do you."

"Youse was going to do drill," sneered the man who had lost his notebook.

"That was before I looked you in the eye, son."

And then I walked back along the line to report my progress to the men. I swung my cane. The magpie, a lovely bird, gave such a clear happy cry, like an angel gargling in a crystal vase.

Of the fifty men gathered at the siding, only three had no inclination for a fight, and one of these was an old fellow known as "Doc" who shouldered his bluey and whistled up his lame fox-terrier before formally wishing them all well. He made a small speech with many classical allusions. The other two made off without a word to anyone, walking slowly up the road past the railway Johns who were still lounging against the siding platform. O'Dowd called out to them. They slowed, then stopped. The big stooped one took off his swag and gave it to his mate. Then he walked across and was surrounded by the bullies for a good three minutes. Finally he departed with his mate.

O'Dowd knew the bagmen were solid. I looked at my watch and sipped my tea.

Leah had the commie over to one side by some black forty-four-gallon drums. She listened to him with a bowed head and then, lifting her dark eyes, asked quiet, intent questions. The bagmen, I saw, were starved for the softness of children's skin and the agitation of small squirming bodies and you could see it in the eyes of those who did not even acknowledge Charles and Sonia that they, too, "'ad one just like 'im". The homesickness was palpable.

A big bushman called Clout was at work with a tomahawk making batons. When he had trimmed a bit of ironbark to size, or knocked the worst splinters of a split fence post, he would swing it around his head a few times before crashing it down on the rails. Yet in spite of Clout's displays of violence, it was a very quiet, pleasant, sunny day, only spoiled by the excess of blowflies which gathered on the bushman's sweat-dark back and hung in clouds around the mouths of those inclined to yarning.

At twenty past the hour we heard a train. It was not the one we wanted. It came around the river flat below at enormous speed, getting up chuff for the slow crawl up the hill on whose crest we sat. This spot, fifteen miles from Bendigo, was known to bagmen all through the country as "Walkers' Hill" because you could – from either side of this crest -jump the rattler at a leisurely walking pace.