And Sheep are Nervous: Seven Years in Australia

AND SHEEP ARE NERVOUS: Seven Years In Australia
Australia: where men are men and sheep are nervous
(Graffiti on downtown Sydney wall, 1980)

ONE

“You’ll be so-o-o-rry. Oh, you’ll be so-o-o-o sorry.”

One hundred metres separated the two ships. Their ship was northbound across the Great Bitter Lake and towards the northern part of the Suez Canal. Their destination was England. They were going home. Our ship was southbound. Our destination was Australia, the land of promise. They were sailing from Australia, the land of disappointment. They were a boatload of disgruntled English migrants – belly aching bastards from Britain, as my uncle labelled them. We were a thousand and more working-class Brits ready to make a go of it in our chosen new homeland. My dad and I hung over the ship’s rail straining to hear what these ‘ungrateful buggers’ had to say.
“Don’t listen to them lad,” said dad with his Yorkshire certainty. “Sounds to me like they’re just a bunch of Londoners anyway. They’re never satisfied. Probably went out there on the ten pound plan, stayed for two years, didn’t do a stick of work the whole bloody time and now they’re coming back to leech off the British welfare system. Bunch of bloody no-hopers.”
“You’re probably right, dad,” I agreed, but I was troubled.
It was the first I’d heard that maybe Australia wasn’t a totally perfect land; the land where you never got cold; the land where all the birds were brightly coloured; the land where you could be a cowboy if you wanted to and that would be okay with me.

I’d spent the last two of my total 13 years steeping myself in the wonders of Australia. I’d read the history of the explorers, pored over maps that gave me a sense of the landscape and memorized mean temperatures for all the main centres across the country. I’d bored my school mates with my talk of mean winter temperatures in Rockhampton being higher than the mean summer temperatures in Rotherham. None of my pals really gave much of a damn about my pro-Australian rantings. How Rotherham United was doing in the Third Division and who felt up Audrey Pepper in the park last night (Audrey wore a tight white T shirt most days), was much more important to my pals than the mean winter temperature of Goondiwindi.
“Who cares?” said Eric Mulligan, “If it gets cold you just put another bloody jumper on and you run to school. Anway, I like it when it’s cold. That’s when we play footie.”
I cared. I cared a lot. I’d had enough of Yorkshire. Trips up to the Derbyshire moors, outside Sheffield were fun alright but it wasn’t adventure. Real adventure meant you had to travel a long way to get to it. Australia was over 12,000 miles away.
“That’s a bloody long way!” Eric’s dad said to my dad.
“It sure is.” said my dad.
When the Rotherham Advertiser, our local weekly newspaper, caught wind that one of Rotherham’s families was making that long trip, the reporter came around and interviewed my dad. We all rushed out to buy the paper the next Saturday.
“It’s in there!” I shouted, running into the back of the house, through the kitchen. “And there’s a picture of dad in there too.”
“Give it here!” demanded dad. He grabbed the paper with his big work-worn hands and started to read. Standing, with his back to the sputtering coal fire in the kitchen, rocking back and forth on his heels, he proudly intoned: “When Mr. Ward was asked why he had made the decision to emigrate to Australia he said: ‘Because there’s room for my kids to grow out there!’”
“Pretty good huh?” he beamed at us.
Mum came in from our greengrocers shop at the front of the house.
“What’s all the fuss Charlie?”
“Dad’s in the paper,” I said proudly ,“In the bloody Rotherham Advertiser.”
And then all hell broke loose. My sister Mary and brother Ted were there, the Paynes and Mulligans, and Morans and Rafterrys and Hunters and Wilsons were there. Even Johnny Wilson was there. He must have just got out of prison. Billie Eastwood, the fishmonger was there, stinking up the place with his fishy smell. The kitchen was full.
“Let’s see, Charlie!”
“Bloody ‘ell, Charlie Ward’s in t’ paper, it’s about him and the family going to bloody Australia.”
There hadn’t been as much excitement in our house since we got the television two years before; one of the first TVs on the street and the whole street came in to watch. We all watched a program on some blokes climbing up the outside of the Eiffel Tower. We weren’t sure if the picture was supposed to be going round and round like that. Was it because the blokes were climbing up, or was something up with the telly?
“I think you’ve got to turn the knob at the back that says vertical ‘old,” advised Eric Mulligan’s dad.
“No it’s the ‘orizontal ‘old, Charlie!” shouted Mickey Payne’s dad.”
It became a shouting match:
“Vertical ‘old.”
“‘Orizontal ‘old.”

The opinions were split about 50/50. Charlie was in the back there twiddling away. Eventually the screen went blank and everybody left in disgust. Television, who needed one?
“I think Charlie’s wasted ‘is money on that thing! Imagine how many pints that would of bought!” For Dad drinking wasn’t of any great importance, so he didn’t care how many pints you could have bought with the money the telly cost.
But that telly filled a lot of hours for me during school holidays, watching the same old ‘test program’, afternoon after afternoon in that room full of boxes of bananas, oranges and persimmons. Stuff from all over the bloody world and the creeping damp working its insidious way up the wall paper. So there I sat, watching the test program on the telly, surrounded by the smells of the tropics and the Yorkshire dampness. My brother Ted would be there sometimes, telling me something I didn’t want to know about what I was watching for the 321st time. Mary, my sister, was never there. She had better things to do with her friends. She’d even started hanging around with a church group. Going to church on Sundays and to meetings at the church during the week. None of us could imagine why. But Mum said Mary’s going to church was probably harmless and might even do some good. Dad never ventured an opinion about the church stuff, although he would try to get us to go to Sunday School on Sunday afternoons, just so he could get a “bit of peace and quiet” and read his cowboy books in front of the kitchen fire. Ted and I gratefully took the collection money and went off with some pals to the local park and bought ice cream with the money. We reckoned if there was a god, he wouldn’t mind us spending his money on ice cream.
Some Sundays we’d run into some pervert in the park and he’d ask one of us to put our hand in his pocket to get some sweets. Ted almost put his hand in there once. “Don’t be daft,” warned Eric Mulligan, he’s just got his dick in there and he wants you to touch it. Ted pulled back his hand as though the pervert’s dick had bitten him and looked embarrassed. The pervert looked angry and walked off. One day a bloke with a young girl told us that, if we met him at seven that night, down by the public library in the town centre, he’d give us some money and a ride on his shoulders. Ted was all for going. “Don’t be daft,” said Eric the wise. “He only wants to play with your dick.” Bowing to Eric’s wisdom, none of us went.
A greater danger in the park was that of other lads a couple of years older than us. There was always somebody out to beat you up. There would always be the stories going round that so and so is after you. Being ‘after you’ meant that this bigger lad was going to get you and beat the shit out of you. Not for any particular reason. That’s just what bigger lads did to littler lads. And the littler lads would, no doubt, do the same when they got bigger. The big lad who made my life hell for two years was Pete Wilson. He, and his two toadies, came up to the two Mulligan boys, my school-mate, Johnny Stamp, Ted and me, one Sunday afternoon in the park.
“Piss off out of here or we’ll make a right mess of the lot of you,” they yelled at us.
The odds being very much against us, we took Pete’s advice and pissed off. As we were walking out of the park gates, we ran into a couple of lads who were much older than us and even older than Pete Wilson and his cronies. They were probably about 16. We knew them vaguely because one of them lived on our street. We related the tale of being told to piss off by Pete Wilson and his cronies.
“Tell you what,” the bigger of the two said, “You”, pointing to me, “go back down there and tell that bugger you’re not scared of him and that you’ll fight him. If he takes you up on it, we’ll just kick the shit out of him.” We all thought that sounded pretty good. So back into the park we went. Pete Wilson was sitting up on top of the park wall.
“Hey” I called, “Does ya wanna fight?”
“Ya what???” retorted Wilson, looking down on me in disbelief, “A fight with you, ya little shit. Ya gotta be kidding, right?”

“No, I’m bloody not!” I shouted back, sounding much braver than I felt. But a quick look around assured me the two big lads were still there.
Wilson jumped down. “Right then,” he says and punches me in the head. I punch him back a few times but I’m obviously getting the worst of it, one of my punches to five of his and they’re hurting. I lower my head and go in for the solar plexus, whilst he is battering at the top of my head and trying to get a few punches up under my face. Some are landing and I’m bleeding pretty badly, starting to feel dizzy. Where the fuck are those big lads? I’m wondering.
“‘ere, ‘ere, break it up you lads.”
I’m saved, a grown-up steps in and breaks up the fight. I collapse on the grass and feel the cooling rain on my face. Pete Wilson takes off. So do the two big lads. For the rest of my days in England, Pete Wilson keeps seeking me out and saying: “Hey Wardie, does ya wanna finish that fight?” Mostly I try to keep as far away from Wilson as I can. Pete Wilson was yet another reason why Australia seemed so attractive. I never tell my Dad about this episode because I know he’s a good fighter and would never lose a fight. He was the cock of his school and he’d fought his way across the Australian bush. As a son I felt like a bit of a failure, at least in the fighting department.
TWO
Ever since I could remember, and I have a good memory, my dad, Charlie Ward, had talked about going to Australia. When he came home from the War, the conquering Royal Marine, he talked about it. He left the marines before the end of the War because we all got bad cases of whooping cough and they demobbed him on compassionate grounds.
You bloody near died, the lot of you.” he said. “I had to come home so you wouldn’t die.”
“But you weren’t a doctor dad. How could you stop us from dying?”
“By being here lad, by helping your mum with you kids. You were all sick. How could your mum take care of you lot when she was sick herself, whooping and sicking all over the place?”
“Oh.”
There was a greengrocer’s shop on the ground floor, in the front part of our semi-detached house. The house was at the end of a row of terraced houses, so it was relatively posh. It even had a bathroom, something virtually unknown in the Rotherham working-class houses. So sometimes my mates thought we were rich.
“ We’re not bloody rich,” I’d argue. “If we were bloody rich, we’d live up on Donny Road or somewhere like that.”
For the duration of the War and a couple of years after, the greengrocer’s shop lay idle, a spooky sort of place that still held onto the smell of mouldy potatoes, after all those years. When dad had come home, the conquering hero and saver of his family, he went to work in the local steelworks, wheeling barrows of cooling pig iron ingots away from the blast furnaces. Some pay days I’d walk down to the steelworks with him to pick up his pay cheque. It was down into the valley and along the canal, by the gasworks. The gasworks always seemed a scary place to me and I’d draw closer to dad. He was a big man, about six foot two. He’d extend his big hand out to me and I’d walk along, proud that my dad was my dad and that he worked at the blast furnace. Going into the works was like descending into hell. The roar of the blast furnace, the clash of steel, the whirring of the cranes, in the high roof overhead. I was pleased when dad had his cheque and we were on the way, back up the hill. If dad was feeling generous we might pop into a sweet shop and he’d buy me a treat, like a Mars bar. I had to remember to bring my ration book along, so the shop keeper could clip my coupon when dad handed her the fourpence for the Mars bar. Strolling back up the hill to home, munching contentedly on my Mars bar and dad puffing happily on his Woodbine, we would feel father-and-son close and dad would tell me stories of his youth. They would almost always start out:
“When I was in Australia….”
There was the story of how his nose got crooked because he was on a galloping horse that ran into a wire fence. The top wire caught him right in the bridge of his nose. When you saw his reflection in the mirror, his nose was really bent off centre. I often wondered if he knew what he really looked like. I mean the real, unreflected him didn’t have a nose bent that badly. But in the mirror it was bent right over. Made him look like a boxer. There were all the stories about when he had to bail his hard-drinking, hard-fighting, boss out of some lock up in some small town in western New South Wales. There were the stories of his great fights, when he had put down bigger men than himself with a crushing right blow to the jaw. Some of this would be acted out. “Watch out dad!” I’d yell as he backed up to deliver that crushing blow “You’ll fall in the canal.” His best fight story was about the cocky farmer in Queensland that he put on his back because of some dispute over what cow should be milked when and how. The literal punch line to that story was one that stayed with me for life.
“I only ever had to look up to one boss in my life Jim, and I put him on his ass.”
Charlie Ward, my dad, had a big nose, a big heart and something of a temper. He was kind to people who were not as strong as him but he was intolerant of different points of view. His philosophy was pretty simple. Work hard and you’ll be okay. He’d worked hard most of his life. He wouldn’t have much sympathy for the modern credo about working smart. Working hard was what counted. Sometimes you’d make money doing that, sometimes you wouldn’t, but you could sleep okay at night because you’d worked hard, you’d pulled your weight. My dad was a bit of a local hero. My pals would say things like.
“ I can see your dad used to be a cowboy by the way he walks. He’s obviously ridden horses a lot and you can tell he used to have a six gun strapped to one leg.”
My dad was the Tom Mix of Rotherham. He encouraged this talk about him by telling me cowboy tales of Australia. He wasn’t a big reader but on Sundays, he would sit in this old canvas kind of deck chair thing, in front of the fire, with a Zane Grey western. .
In my young mind there was a close connection between America and Australia. America was the promised land. It was the place that produced those great comics like Crime Does Not Pay, Captain Marvel, War Heroes. All my heroes were in the American mode. They wore U.S. Army helmets and cold stogies stuck out of their stubbled jaws, while they nonchalantly overran the German, Japanese and Chinese forces. Hopalong Cassidy overcame overwhelming odds in his various struggles with evil, money-grubbing ranchers. I wanted to be like him. Those comics made our British comics like Dandy, Beano, and Comic Cuts look insipid and silly. We wore American T shirts, American jeans and chewed gum, while the adults complained about the fact, as they saw it, that Britain had won the war and the Americans were getting all the credit. For the English working-class boy, being as American as possible was the same as being liberated, exciting and adventurous. For our schoolteachers, America had usurped the British right to run the world. For us, it was move over Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway are coming over the hill. Australia wasn’t exactly America, but there were a lot of similarities. It was almost the same in area (without Alaska); I’d checked this out in my atlas, and there were – sort of- cowboys there, after all my dad had been one.
Dad thought big too. Once he got the greengrocers shop going again, in the late 1940s, he decided to buy a big flatbed truck to go get the fruit and vegetables from the Sheffield markets at some hour before anybody else was up in the house. When he parked that truck in our street, it took up half of the street and we used the back of it as a playground. Dad didn’t mind either. He was happy to oblige. Sometimes he’d take us all for a spin, hanging off the back of the truck. Once, just before Guy Fawkes, we were lighting bangers in the cab of the truck and then flinging them out just as they exploded. Dad thought that was a great lark. I was a bit slow in getting one out and it exploded within a couple of feet of my head. Dad thought this was hilarious.
Mum was pretty good-natured about all this. She wasn’t as outgoing as dad but she knew how to have a laugh. In the couple of years just before we set sail for Australia, she decided her bum was getting a bit too big so she started an exercise regimen that included her banging her bum against the wall. Mum used to listen patiently to all dad’s tales of “When I was in Australia” but she never showed much of an interest in actually going there. For mum, it was sufficient that we’d all survived the War intact, including several air raids that had taken out some of the neighbouring houses and the windows of our house. There was too the dreaded whooping cough, from which we almost all died, had it not been for dad so heroically quitting the Royal Marines. “Family before country”, dad would say and mum would nod. So mum seemed pretty content with life. Then one day….
It was a typically grey November day; the kind of greyness at which Yorkshire excels. It’s no accident that the bleak tales of the Bronte’s were set in Yorkshire. Yorkshire life leads to a certain bleakness of outlook. It’s probably something to do with all those gray days. It’s probably also got something to do with Yorkshire’s long role as a major source of coal and steel in industrial Britain.