My Twenties - too Bloody Right Mate! Becoming Bazza Mackenzie
The voyage to Australia on the Achille Lauro was wonderful. We called at Genoa and Valetta, picking immigrants from Italy and Malta to join their rapidly growing communities in Sydney and Melbourne.
Traveling through the Suez Canal, it was surprising to see the Egyptian airforce neatly displayed on the runways at Ismailia. It was rapidly wiped out a few months later in the 1967 war between Israel and the Arab States, and the Canal was only to be re-opened in 1973 (I helped plan the reconstruction of the city of Suez at that time).
We also called at Aden, which was still then a British Protectorate (now part of Yemen). However, the British troops there were dealing with the unrest that presaged independence at we were not allowed ashore. I ate enormously of the marvelous food and was seriously overweight by the time we arrived in Perth.
WA seemed like a wonderland and I was struck by what seemed like extraordinary wealth on the bus trip from Fremantle to the city (I now realize that this was a particularly well-heeled area). It was therefore even more surprising to be asked for a dollar by an old drunk in one of the parks. The trip across the Bight to Sydney was a bit anticlimactic until we saw the city for the first time – love at first sight.
I spent 7 years in all in Australia from early 1967 to late 1973 but this includes six months back in the UK in 1968 to help clear up things at Corner Farm in the aftermath of Horace’s death.
Both Canberra and ANU were the recipients of lavish funding from the Commonwealth Government and I soon found that, as a student, I was much better off financially than I had been working in England. Everything was new and clean – and most importantly sunny.
Also, the girls – almost universally leggy and tanned / sensual and exotic, it seemed, - were rapidly becoming influenced by flower power and California dreaming – this was after all the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
I had also dreamed up a fantastic Ph.D. topic that allowed me to take one of the ANU’s Landrovers off for months roving over Northern Australia. I twice drove the circle – Canberra – Adelaide – Cooberpeedy – Alice Springs – Darwin – Cloncurry – Brisbane – Canberra. I estimated once that I drove 17,000 miles on these jaunts and I visited about 45 of the 180 cattle properties of the Northern Territory.
So ocker did I become that when I returned to the UK in 1973, I was rapidly nicknamed Bazza, after Barry Mackenzie, the slightly goofy, boozy and disaster-prone hero of Barry Humphries’ cartoon strip: ‘I was sitting in the surf, with a mate of mine called Murph, with a bucket full of prawns upon my knee. When I swallowed the last prawn, I had a technicolour yawn, and chundered in the old Pacific Sea’.
However, my early introduction to the Australian Bush was not auspicious. It was arranged that I would travel up to Townsville to meet up with Jack Kelly and his son Jim for a Landrover expedition to the cattle stations of Cape York and the Gulf of Carpentaria . Now Jack was a truly authentic identity. He had been a soldier with the Australian Light Horse in Palestine in WW1, trained as an opera singer in Italy, and had to walk off his selection as a Soldier Settler in the Riverina during the Depression.
He was also about 70 when I met him, suffering from severe eye problems and officially unable to drive. But he was a very interesting character – anti-English because of his Irish background but fiercely devoted to left-wing causes and the development of Northern Australia. Anyhow, he and Jim parted company near Cunnamulla and he obtained a driving licence from a local cop who was a friend.
Jack and I lasted together a month until he ‘bushed’ me near Lakefield, Cape York. (‘I wouldn’t have lasted 2 days with him’, said a prominent critic, Member of Parliament Rex Patterson, when I recounted the story). Even so, I will always have a soft spot for Jack because of his great vitality and humour – I suspect we were quite alike in many ways. He also introduced me to Tom Paine’s famous dictum ‘My country is the World: to do good is my Religion’. I have always tried to keep these words in mind.
The Northern Territory of the late 1960s was a pretty amazing place. It had a total population of 28,000 Europeans (4,000 in Alice Springs, 20,000 in Darwin and the rest scattered over 500,000 square miles.
I made the mistake in the Outback outfitters Don Thomas of agreeing to purchase a hat like the one that had been bought by Prince Charles when he had visited. This caused me innumerable problems and I remember a rather rum-soaked trip up the Tanami Stockroute with a stock and station agent, during which we holed the petrol tank of his ute late in the evening. Every now and then, the agent would stop – move on a bit – and then light the pool of leaked petrol to see how bad the leak was. He would also take off my hat, find a cow pat and stamp the two together.
Eventually, I met an aboriginal stockman at Borroloola Races and we swapped hats – to his great delight. For years, I kept his hat and could recapture the smells at least of those days by moistening it a little . The resulting aroma of cattle and horse sweat, diesel and badly rinsed soapy, stale clothing would bring instant recall.
I was, I have to say, prone to these kind of faux pas – another was asking for a shandy in the Alice Springs Hotel. There was always the risk that such carelessness could result in a fight or worse. For example, I once got thrown out of the pub at Mataranka for defending the aborigines. The local response was ‘If I had my way mate, we would send out a stock party, round them all up – and put them on a plane to Canberra with a bag of skinning knives and a ton of plonk – and let you bastards get on with them’.
Perhaps it is worth adding another paragraph or two on the Territory of that time and my exploits there. For example, I remember arriving at Montejinni Station in the Victoria River District only to find the operator away surveying his stock in a light plane. His wife put me to work training the bougainvillea over an arch in the garden but this was soon interrupted by the sound of screaming from the wash house, where the aboriginal laundress had been disturbed by a snake.
The station operator's wife demanded that, as the only available male, I should kill the snake. However, growing up among long, glossy, beautiful but perfectly harmless grass snakes in England is no preparation for dealing with a king brown or a taipan.
Anyhow, duty was done, perhaps more by luck than good judgment. I also abandoned a subsequent attempt to kill and eat a large goanna lizard when it became obvious that it viewed me as a potential meal. More upsetting in some respects, as alluded to above, were social gaffes. Blessed by an ability to mimic accents, I was ever the chameleon and could pass quite easily as Australian. However, I made the mistake once of commenting to my host on a station near the Gulf of Carpentaria that the plates that we were eating off showed scenes that were more like where I grew up (they pictured rustic English cottages in blue on white). This was not welcome.
I also have vivid memories of being rained out on a trip across to Nicholson Station from Rosewood - and taking refuge along with a convoy of other travellers at Nicholson. When the rain stopped, I started off on the trip from Nicholson to Wave Hill, only to find a 'ute' (open-backed utility vehicle) stuck in the black soil plains surrounded by inquisitive cattle.
Imagine my surprise to find that the occupant was an attractive blond who had been sent ahead by her husband who had waited out the storm on a raised red soil tract with his water drilling rig. She had survived for 4 days on one piece of cooked silver-side beef and the water that had collected in the washing tub on the back of the vehicle.
I was able to reunite her with her husband, after giving her a tin of peaches and a can opener.
On the same trip I also came across a professional shooter who was drying his 'ears' - he was paid by the numbers of donkey, brumby (wild horse) and camel ears that he brought back after a 3-4 month sojourn in the Bush. More disturbingly, I caught up with a whole convoy of 140 foot-long, abandoned road trains slewed into the mud in various angles, surrounded by the odd dead cow that had failed to survive the long wait during the storm or the subsequent jump down from the trains when all hope of progress was lost and the cattle were set free .
I was also very privileged to see the end of cattle droving and the old-style 'cowboys' that had been such a lively part of my imagination as a young lad in Cheshire. I have vivid memories of visiting a droving plant (i.e. team) and its 'mob' and of staying the night nearby in the Bush. The plant was taking 1,700 head of mixed cattle down the stockroutes of the Barkly Tableland into the Channel Country (the typical movement down from the North West of Australia towards the railheads that linked to Townsville, Rockhamption, and Brisbane).
The drovemaster was a Territorian of 'Afghan' descent, with a name something like Ted Abdul .
It is hard to describe the quiet majesty of 1,700 cattle moving at 7 miles per day. And also hard to adequately portray the incredible beauty of the Territory of those years - dusty, endless with 'horizons where you can see away for ever'. I fell deeply in love with the vast skies and the red fire-plough roads that stretched empty far beyond.
I came to relish being alone at night under the raging stars, boiling a billy before dossing down on a camp stretcher - listening to Indonesia crackling away on the radio.
And socially, it was not all that different to what I had been accustomed to in Cheshire. The preoccupation with what family operated which station, the gossip passed down the track, and the yarns concerning fabled individuals like the Darcy brother from Mallapunyah Springs whose feet were so big that he couldn't wear boots when he rode, preferring instead to stick his bare big toe in the stirrup! In some respects, it was as though a piece of rural England had been sprayed in a fine mist across the finer part of a continent, leaving individual farms / stations scattered tens of miles apart to provide the 'village' names .
Horace’s death on 4th August 1968 brought to an end my direct connection with farming in England. I had always held the hope that I would farm myself at some point but this was not to be and we relinquished the tenancy of Corner Farm at the end of 1968. My nearest approach was to bring on the heifers that Horace had bought for the Back End (autumn).
The farm had been in a kind of suspended animation following the loss of all the stock in the major Foot and Mouth outbreak of 1967 and the heifers that he had bought started to calve in the September of 1968. I calved and sold 4 of them at Beeston Auction, with some help, prior to the Sale. I also acted as surrogate father to 44 piglets from 4 sows (a very respectable survival rate).
I especially wanted to make sure that the farm was clean and tidy for the Sale, as Horace was so particular about these things. After the stock had been sold up, I stayed on over Christmas to be with Meg. She then moved to the house that she had bought in Bunbury – Lindren, Wyche Lane.
In the period between selling the stock and leaving by plane to return to Australia, I worked as a hospital porter (orderly) at the Barony Hospital, Nantwich with a pay of GBP 13 per week. However, this being the height of the old Welfare State, each male patient got a bottle of brown ale and a bottle of pale ale as an Xmas present. As many of our clientele were geriatric and beyond drink, we did our best to express the hospital’s gratitude to the Government by returning empties only.
I have always had a lot of affection for Australia in general and had some great times and made some good friends. Trips down to Sydney and the Beach (places like Congo Beach near Bateman’s Bay) were special favourites. Night-time prawning with work colleagues John Chappell and Mike Webber was great.
We also used to party a good deal, particularly during University Week (‘Bush Week’) and there were some ‘Woodstock’ type music festivals at Gundaroo near Canberra. I had some pretty way out friends like Owen Stanley and Sam Aboud.
On one occasion we had a 2-day party at Sam’s property near Cooma, and even succeeded in getting his horses drunk while we raced them up and down the paddock. Sam was always into new schemes like catching wild donkeys in the Simpson Desert and trucking them down to Sydney to sell them to householders as children’s pets!
But there were more serious aspects – like the ongoing Viet Nam war that led to student protests. I was also involved in protests about the South African Rugby team visiting Australia and in support of the ‘Aboriginal Embassy’ that was established on the lawns in front of Parliament House.
When I finished my Ph.D. thesis, I was asked to stay on to lecture in Geography and did so for 3 years. However, university life had begun to tire. I wasn’t convinced that I knew much that was really worth passing on to the next generation of student and I felt that I should do something that was more practical and involved. I was also thinking about returning to England – partly for family reasons but partly also because many of my Australian friends considered Swinging London to be the centre of things.
Eventually, I teamed up with a long-time friend Maureen Anderson and when I left Canberra to take up a half-year sabbatical at the University of Western Australia and return from there to the UK, she and her 4-year old daughter, from a previous relationship, Danielle accompanied me on the drive across – including negotiating the Nullarbor Plain (about 400 km of the road remained unsealed at that time). We still have a wooden lizard that was purchased from a Mission shop along the way.
I was very fond of both Maureen and Dani but it was a bit of a nightmare to eventually find us all staying with Meg at Bunbury in the gathering English winter gloom . What the hell was I going to do now and how was I going to provide some kind of home for my rather casually acquired family?
CONSULTING / RESEARCH ASSIGMENTS DURING THIS PERIOD
Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea Government / Australian National University 1971Development Economist Economist for evaluation of small-holder and commercial beef production techniques and problems
Australia Australian National University / Reserve Bank of Australia 1967-70Development Economics / Human Geography Researcher Completed PhD thesis on the application of benefit-cost analysis to the appraisal of developmental road investment (the 'Beef Roads Program') in the Northern Territory of Australia
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