Australia 3, A travellers tale

As the winter season approached we prepared ourselves for the next phase of our Australian life. I would be going to North Queensland two months, but the rules did not permit my wife to come with me, even though she was pregnant with our first child. The crew, Eddie Polak, party chief, myself. and Charlie Braybrook and Jack Piggot the technicians. Our first stop was Mount Garnet, a mining town in The Atherton Table lands, where we stayed in Lucey’s hotel run by Erin and Sheila Lucey. It was a mining community attached to an alluvial tin dredging operation, and we were looking for an extension to the alluvial deposits. Luceys naturally had a bar with extremely flexible opening Hours as it was a mining town, and we soon fitted in as regulars as we could not have been accompanied by purer Aussies than Jack and Charley. Most days after our evening meal we worked on the days survey results and then retired to the bar for night cap. I had made it known that I was trying to photograph wild life, and periodically some one would come into the bar with a wriggling sack of wild life, normally snakes. This way I temporarily obtained a rock python a green tree snake, which I erroneously thought was non venemous, 3 smallcaroet snakes and a bat. The bat was most fun as it hung from my finger until I took it the kitchen, and it took off doing circuits and bumps over the screaming Luceys hiding under the table.

On Sunday nights when we were not working we spent time in the bar and I used to com[ose ridiculous verses about the area which amused the Luceys and the locals.

By this time I had to a great extent adapted myself to the style of a rural Aussie, masking my Pommie accent. Most of the people one met working casually in the bush were immigrants so as long as you dressed improperly there were no great problems in being credible. As an illustration, we happened to be in the bar at lunch time one day when a car with a camper trailer pulled up outside. (I should point out that Mount Garnet was about 40 miles into the tablelands from Ravenshoe, which was a proper town.) A man got out and came into the bar and he was wearing no shoes, he told us his wife kept them in the car so he would not run away. He was on his long service leave and hoping to find out what the real Australian outback was like. There were maybe a dozen men in the bar, all appropriately dressed for a part with Crocodile Dundee, as an established raconteur I could not resist. I asked him where he had come from, and he said he had just come from Ravenshoe, I expressed surprise that the road was open. He asked why and I explained that the tall trees by the road were Iron Bark gums, and we had an invasion of dingos the size of brumbies (wild horses) that were lifting their legs against the iron barks, causing. them to rust and fall down and they had been blocking the roads in the the area. I then asked where he was going, and he said Cloncurry, which was about 150 miles beyond where we were. There was much head shaking among the locals in the bar, and I explained that the direct road was probably closed by the fallen Iron barks, but he could get through if he took the detour at the edge of town and drove an extra 20 miles. We all went out of the bar to see him off, and he did take the detour!

Eddie Polak was originally Polish and was an officer in the Polish army when Germany invaded Poland, he esaped to England and served out the rest of the war as he put it ” The only Polish officr who could not sing” He completed his interrupted geological and geophysical studies at Birmingham University, and then came to Australia.

Charley Braybrook and Jack Piggot were both some kind of technician in the Australian Air force I believe. Both enthusiastic consumers of alcoholic spirits, but experts technically. If they were both drinking at once it created a problem.