Old Days, Old Ways by Alex Nicol

Author:Alex Nicol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

STEP BACK IN TIME

None of the interviews I collected for All Ways on Sunday survive. That’s disappointing. Not because my work has been lost, but because the voices of the people who told the stories have been lost, and often so much of the story was not in the words but in the voice that spoke them.

In most cases, the people I spoke with let me look back one generation. I was talking with my father’s generation, if you like. On a couple of rare occasions I was able to look further back, and hear the voice of a very different Australia.

Once I talked with a very old man who claimed that, as a youngster, he’d witnessed the Kelly Gang’s hold-up at Jerilderie. He had a laugh as he remembered the ‘strange police sergeant’ cutting down the telegraph post in front of the police station. It is just possible that he did see Ned—the gang struck in 1879—though he’d have been a very young child. Most likely his memory of the event was a memory of what adults had told him.

Things were very different when I met a Light Horseman who had fought in Palestine in the First World War. Like the driver for the original Cobb & Co. coach service, he was old and ill, but his memory was sharp and, make no mistake, he’d been there.

The Light Horseman hailed from Western Australia and, as I expected, he talked about the dirt and the flies and the bond that grew between horse and rider. He complained about ‘Barcoo Rot’—sores that wouldn’t heal, and which he put down to a lousy diet—and the heat, and he reckoned that ‘they took better care of the horses than they did of us’. He told me one story that sent a chill through me.

They were moving in a column through a town, and a beggar sat at the roadside, he said. The horseman’s picture of the man was of something that was barely recognisable as human—he was clothed in rags and probably blind. The horseman was looking at this apparition when a young officer rode up. He looked down at the beggar, and then pulled out his pistol and—in the horseman’s words—‘gave him a pill, put him out of his misery like’.

I think it’s very wrong to judge past generations by the standards of today, so I make no comment. What I can’t recapture, and what you’ll never hear, is the matter-of-fact way in which the old man told his story. He didn’t seem to find it exceptional. It was just part of his experience of a war that’s rapidly passing into Australian mythology.

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