Broome to Angie and my daughter but the relationship had soured. While I’d been in boob she’d moved on. I decided it was time for me to move on as well so I headed for Darwin to start again. I was pretty thick but I was starting to realise that I was wasting a lot of my life being locked up. A fresh pasture was going to start with the turning over of my new leaf. Well … I had good intentions.’
‘Over to the left,’ Allan waved as we came into sight of the pot line. Roy had been engrossed in his story and wasn’t concentrating. With Allan in the boat I just sat up the front and watched in awe as the catch was sorted and trussed up in a blur of fingers amongst the lethal nippers. I didn’t mention how impressed I was because I feared Roy would make tying angry crabs part of my Top End education.
‘Going straight? I remember quite a few times when he tried it,’ Anne grinned as she threw some meat on the grill for lunch. ‘Many times he’d had good intentions to get a real job but his “dark side” always reared its ugly head. Remember back in the mid-50s when you were being harassed by the law in Adelaide?
You’d been hooning around on your motorbike with no licence, fighting and lots of other minor offences. You always endeared yourself to the police by saying things like, “ah, you screw our mother you pig!” and other niceties. Real toffy stuff, Roy. then you wonder why the police have no senses of humour!’
‘It wasn’t all the blues I had with the coppers that gave me the shits,’ Roy answered. ‘I enjoyed them. It was the bloody fines. They hurt and I hated them with a passion.
‘I remember the very first time I cleared out to start again,’ Roy said thoughtfully. ‘It was the end of 1955 when a mate of mine, Brian Bradshaw, got a job on Kangaroo Island and I decided to go as well. I’d heard that a change was as good as a holiday, so when we boarded the old Karatta at Port Adelaide I sniffed the salt air with excitement.
‘A lot of soldier settlers from the Second World War were clearing the land over there and one of the ways they could get a bit of cash was by harvesting yakka gum. Yakkas were everywhere and the gum was highly sought after in the process of making varnish.
‘We’d spread a tarp on the ground and drop a yakka onto it. Cutting the fronds back exposed all the sticky gum. The gum went into a container and you moved on to the next yakka and started the process again. It wasn’t much of a job out in the scrub, and the pay was lousy, so I soon got bored.
‘We eventually chucked it in and got a job with better pay on the edge of Kingscote. There were big heaps of gravel in a clearing and our job was to shovel tons of it up into trucks to be delivered around the island. There was no front-end loader – just a mob of us young bucks shovelling like hell. We were fit so it didn’t worry us very much but it wasn’t a long-term career.
‘Always on the lookout for ways of making a few extra bob, I soon spotted a few items I could heist and sell for a tidy profit. Free enterprise was alive and well but my plan needed a truck. I found just the vehicle I needed on the wharf in Kingscote. It was used to tow trolleys off the jetty. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t to know that the close-knit community of Kingscote was the ultimate Neighbourhood Watch. Everyone noticed anything out of place and especially some young stranger driving a well-known truck where he shouldn’t be. As a result of this I didn’t get very far before I got caught and ended up before the magistrate. A twenty-five pound fine for illegal use of a motor vehicle got me booted off the island. So much for my fresh start!
‘Thieving was taking over my life and I didn’t know why because I wasn’t brought up that way. While I was waiting to go to court on the island I had no money so I committed one of the two crimes in my life that I’m truly ashamed of. It showed what an idiot I’d become. We hadn’t eaten for a few days so we called into a house to cadge a feed. A lovely lady took us in and made us cups of coffee and a batch of scones. Her purse was on the table so I emptied it out when she wasn’t looking. I thought I was being smart at the time, but that was the lowest act I ever committed. I still think about it to this day.
‘The other low act was when I was on the run from the reformatory in Adelaide a few years later. I went to Bob Waite’s place at Port Noarlunga to ask him for a few quid. He was a great bloke who I used to go fishing with on my pushbike. He and his wife weren’t home so I broke in and went to the teapot where I knew they kept their money and stole a fiver. Bob would have given it to me without question but I went and stole from him instead of waiting for him to come home. That was another low act. I don’t know what was wrong with me! I was becoming a menace to myself and everybody who knew me.
‘Anyway, I hitchhiked to Darwin to start again – again. As usual my reputation hitchhiked faster and beat me there. As far as the coppers were concerned I was immediately Public Enemy Number One, Two and Three so they gave me grief from Day One. They made it quite clear that I should keep going because my sort wasn’t needed in Darwin. I felt that this was a trifle unfair because I had to live somewhere, and besides, I was now in the most laid-back town in Australia, so if I couldn’t live here, there was no hope for me anywhere. Their attention meant I couldn’t get accommodation anywhere. Anyone who let me stay under their roof was under threat of going to gaol for consorting with a known criminal.
‘It was pretty bloody hard. I slept rough but, if it was pouring rain, I was forced to sleep in people’s cars. I’d check out driveways until I found a car unlocked and then climb into the back seat. I’d only half sleep because I had to keep a lookout in the dark. In the morning when the house lights came on as the owner got up to go to work I’d slip out of the car, close the door quietly and wander off. It would take me an hour to get my back straight again. They were hard times.
‘I had a lot of jobs in those early days in Darwin. I really tried to do the right thing. Work would be going okay until my employer found out, or was told by the coppers, that I was a criminal. Then I’d get my marching orders. At least they could have given me time to stuff up first before they sacked me!
‘I worked for Burns Philp on delivery trucks. They ferried oil and grease and motor parts around Darwin. I also had a job with Gus Trippe stacking cement. He had a big cement complex on the beach and we shifted all the cement bags by hand. No forklifts in those days. All grunting. They used to force-feed us with salt tablets every hour to make up for all the sweat we lost. I never sweated so much in my life. Later on I heard that too much salt is bad for you but it didn’t seem to hurt us.
‘I drove trucks for North Australian Haulage, then worked for Gerry Monk at Port Keats driving tractors. He was a contractor with dozers and trucks. I was driving front-end loaders and we had to make lots or corduroys. These were tracks made of logs laid side by side to form a solid base so vehicles could drive across creeks and boggy patches.
‘Gerry was doing a big job for some French mob. They had barrels and barrels of wine in the sheds. These Froggies drank wine like water. I’d go to their kegs, fill up lemonade bottles and swap it with the local tribal Aborigines for bark paintings. When I flew back to Darwin for a few days off I’d flog the paintings to the tourists. It was all clear profit, thanks to the French. I wish I had some of those paintings today because they were genuine paintings and not the crap that’s palmed off these days as the real thing.
‘I left Port Keats with a few bob in my pocket because there was nowhere to spend it. Lodgings and tucker were part of the deal so, for almost the first time in my life, at least since Wittenoom Gorge, I had some honest money. Life was good.
‘At
