that you had to show the whole baying mob that you were a dangerous person, a person prepared to kick, bite, pull hair, tear ears, gouge eyes, squeeze testicles, anything. ‘Don’t worry about fair,’ he said. ‘Dangerous is what you want to be. Go mad. Nobody wants to fight a mad person. Nobody wants fingers stuck up his nose.’
He was right. He also taught me the barfighters’ tricks: the quick chest shoves to get the opponent off balance, the heel scraping down the shin and stamping on the instep, the Adam’s apple punch, the thumbs pressing under the ears, the chop under the nose, the many painful uses of the elbow, the double ear slap, the protruding knuckle in the chestbone. I learned these things and I survived.
Ned Lowey. In all this movement, this rootlessness, this life in shabby houses and scuffed caravan parks and shearers’ quarters that smelled of sweat and ashes, Ned Lowey was the still point. We were on our way to another town, another fight, another departure, when I met him for the first time. It must have been some time after my ninth birthday, but I had been hearing about Ned as far back as I could remember, things like ‘We need bloody Ned Lowey for work like this’, or ‘Here’s a little trick Ned Lowey showed me’, or, at picnic races, ‘Back Ned Lowey ridin sidesaddle against this lot’. We drove into Ned’s backyard and he came out and shook hands with my father. They stood there smiling and slapping each other’s arms.
‘This is the young fella,’ my father said. ‘John. We named him for the wife’s father.’ I remember my surprise at two things. One was that Ned was Aboriginal. My father had never mentioned it. The other was that Ned Lowey was not a giant. I remember that he took me by the shoulders, picked me up and held me to his chest. Then we went into the house to meet his wife. She was sitting in a patch of sun in the kitchen, not doing anything, a gaunt woman with faded blonde hair. I knew without being told that there was something wrong with her.
Ned Lowey. I shook the thoughts away and got up. By seven am, I was in the smithy getting ready to start work on Frank Cullen’s latest contraption. Frank inherited the huge property that had been in his wife’s family, the Pettifers, for generations. That was the end of farming. Now he spent all his time designing strange and usually counterproductive devices. Every six months or so, he came in with a set of plans for another machine that was going to change the face of rural life. The first one I made for him was designed to help elderly farmers mount horses. It featured a hydraulic piston and was said to have enabled the test jockey to mount a tree. The latest one was a sort of tray on wheels that fitted on the back of a ute. By fitting tracks, the tray could be run off the back and loaded. A winch operated by the driver then pulled it back up.
‘Came to me in a flash, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Can’t think why no-one’s ever thought of it.’
‘Takes a special kind of mind,’ I said.
It was almost noon and I had just finished welding the heavy-gauge steel mesh into the angle-iron base when Frank and Jim Caswell arrived. Jim was rumoured to be old man Pettifer’s illegitimate son. Frank was somewhere in his seventies with a big, bony head, patches of hair, exploding eyebrows and ears like baseball mitts. Jim was about fifteen years younger, full head of grey hair cut short, small-featured, neat. He looked like a clerk in some old-fashioned shop. Usually they both wore the squatter’s uniform: tweed jacket, moleskins, blue shirt and tie. Today Jim was in a dark suit, white shirt and navy tie.
They sat down on the bench against the wall and watched me marking the position of the axle mountings. These visits were a feature of the construction period.
‘Nice job so far, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Paying attention to the plans? Worked out in every detail.’
‘Like I was
He was right. He also taught me the barfighters’ tricks: the quick chest shoves to get the opponent off balance, the heel scraping down the shin and stamping on the instep, the Adam’s apple punch, the thumbs pressing under the ears, the chop under the nose, the many painful uses of the elbow, the double ear slap, the protruding knuckle in the chestbone. I learned these things and I survived.
Ned Lowey. In all this movement, this rootlessness, this life in shabby houses and scuffed caravan parks and shearers’ quarters that smelled of sweat and ashes, Ned Lowey was the still point. We were on our way to another town, another fight, another departure, when I met him for the first time. It must have been some time after my ninth birthday, but I had been hearing about Ned as far back as I could remember, things like ‘We need bloody Ned Lowey for work like this’, or ‘Here’s a little trick Ned Lowey showed me’, or, at picnic races, ‘Back Ned Lowey ridin sidesaddle against this lot’. We drove into Ned’s backyard and he came out and shook hands with my father. They stood there smiling and slapping each other’s arms.
‘This is the young fella,’ my father said. ‘John. We named him for the wife’s father.’ I remember my surprise at two things. One was that Ned was Aboriginal. My father had never mentioned it. The other was that Ned Lowey was not a giant. I remember that he took me by the shoulders, picked me up and held me to his chest. Then we went into the house to meet his wife. She was sitting in a patch of sun in the kitchen, not doing anything, a gaunt woman with faded blonde hair. I knew without being told that there was something wrong with her.
Ned Lowey. I shook the thoughts away and got up. By seven am, I was in the smithy getting ready to start work on Frank Cullen’s latest contraption. Frank inherited the huge property that had been in his wife’s family, the Pettifers, for generations. That was the end of farming. Now he spent all his time designing strange and usually counterproductive devices. Every six months or so, he came in with a set of plans for another machine that was going to change the face of rural life. The first one I made for him was designed to help elderly farmers mount horses. It featured a hydraulic piston and was said to have enabled the test jockey to mount a tree. The latest one was a sort of tray on wheels that fitted on the back of a ute. By fitting tracks, the tray could be run off the back and loaded. A winch operated by the driver then pulled it back up.
‘Came to me in a flash, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Can’t think why no-one’s ever thought of it.’
‘Takes a special kind of mind,’ I said.
It was almost noon and I had just finished welding the heavy-gauge steel mesh into the angle-iron base when Frank and Jim Caswell arrived. Jim was rumoured to be old man Pettifer’s illegitimate son. Frank was somewhere in his seventies with a big, bony head, patches of hair, exploding eyebrows and ears like baseball mitts. Jim was about fifteen years younger, full head of grey hair cut short, small-featured, neat. He looked like a clerk in some old-fashioned shop. Usually they both wore the squatter’s uniform: tweed jacket, moleskins, blue shirt and tie. Today Jim was in a dark suit, white shirt and navy tie.
They sat down on the bench against the wall and watched me marking the position of the axle mountings. These visits were a feature of the construction period.
‘Nice job so far, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Paying attention to the plans? Worked out in every detail.’
‘Like I was
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