spine and immobilise them. This may sound barbaric in this day and age but it was very practical. We’d shoot ten or a dozen in this manner.
‘If we shot them all dead at once they would be blown up and half rotten by the time we’d processed the third buffalo. If we only shot a couple, the others would be back in the scrub where we had no chance to find them until they came out to feed again.
‘It was then a simple job to shoot them dead just before we processed them. Once we’d killed and bled a beast, we’d start skinning and break up the carcass as it lay on the skin. This kept the meat clean before it was loaded into huge iceboxes containing big blocks of ice and water.
‘Even though it was hot dirty work with all the blood and flies, it paid well and also gave the coppers the idea I was going straight!
‘Later on, a mate of mine, Colin Powell and myself had a go on our own with a short wheelbase Toyota and a huge icebox in the back. We did all right for awhile but we really needed lots of manpower that knew what they were doing to handle the numbers to make it really profitable.
‘Old Keith was mixed up in lots of lurks, but for me, the most interesting part of his money-making capers was the fishing. He was a very good fisherman so I watched him like a hawk and took particular notice of all the spots where he went. He fished with a line all the time but he reckoned that nets would be the way to go. Old Keith was fairly straight with regard to the law and nets would be illegal in the areas we were helping him fish. There’s that word again. Ill-eagle!
‘By this time I had a house with Marjorie Horrell and Junior, Lisa and Sharon. I now wanted to go fishing full-time on my own. I was a fisherman from way back and I could see how much money could be made with nets. I had a slight problem though. I had all the expertise but I had no gear.
‘I teamed up with a mate called Johnny Bell. Johnny and the law didn’t always see eye to eye, so that made him an ideal business partner for the likes of me. He had a car but we had nothing else. One night we went down to the wharf in Darwin and found a boat that no-one appeared to want so we borrowed it. We spotted a couple of nets in the backyard of old Ridsdale, a crocodile skin buyer in Darwin. He didn’t appear to be using them so we borrowed them as well. It was a great way to start a business with no capital. Free enterprise was alive and well.
‘We did very well because the Mary River was virtually untouched at that time. It wasn’t long before we traded in the borrowed boat and bought an outboard motor and a Toyota to navigate around the river systems.
‘Johnny and I had a lot of fun. He was full of tricks and a mad pommy bastard. I remember one day we were out at Dick Ward Drive where we were camped. Johnny was digging out banana suckers to replant and there was quite a mob of young bucks laying back and watching. Johnny came across this big lizard about a foot long. He grabbed it and brought it across to show the onlookers.
For a joke I said, “I bet you ten dollars you can’t eat it.”
“You’re on!” Johnny laughed. Next thing we see is the lizard’s head disappearing down Johnny’s throat. We all sat there, stunned. This wasn’t natural.
‘As we watched in disbelief we saw the lizard being quickly hauled back out of Johnny’s mouth. It had latched onto his tongue and wasn’t letting go. He was swearing incoherently with a mouth full of lizard. His tongue was eventually pulled about six inches out of his mouth with the lizard still attached.
‘Johnny never had a tooth in his head, so he couldn’t bite it. Realising the lizard wasn’t going to let go, he went back to Plan A and began to swallow it again. His old gums were munching away and I began to vomit. My son Junior was only a kid but he looked scared as he saw the last of the tail disappear.
‘Old Johnny licked his lips and put his hand out for the money. I thought I was going to die. I laughed and vomited. What a performance. I’d lost my teeth while being sick so I had to search through the little piles of my own spew to find them.
‘I paid up, but that wasn’t the end of his impromptu meal. He couldn’t have been feeling all that well himself at this stage because he took off to the dunny. Like most Top End toilets, ours had a mob of frogs that called the cistern their home. When Johnny pulled the chain, all these little legs hung down in the flush of water. He grabbed one of these frogs and when he returned he announced, “And this is dessert.” And down went the little frog. We all started dry-retching again.
‘We had a lot of good times and made a lot of money. Eventually we each went on our separate ways and both did very well.’
‘Lucky you’ve got a long drop,’ I ventured, ‘or Anne’d be serving up frogs for lunch.’
‘Or lizard shish-kebabs,’ laughed Roy.
We’d just finished eating one of Anne’s substantial dinners and we all leaned back on our chairs. Roy stoked the fire up to heat the shower water. When it was hot the cut-off keg full of water would be transferred to the concrete bathroom where a bilge pump pumped the water through a shower head.
‘I don’t care how primitive I live, I’ve always insisted that we go to bed clean,’ Roy said, as he tested the water.
‘I’m not having a shower, Daddy,’ announced Kimberley.
‘You bloody well are, you little bitch,’ Roy replied affectionately.
‘None of us get into that caravan without a shower,’ Roy stated with pride.
‘Another good mate from my poaching days was old Bradley. He owned Bradley’s Secondhand Shop in Darwin. He was an old bloke in his mid-seventies who loved going bush and would drop everything whenever he got the opportunity to join us. We gave him a terrible time but he took it all so he could keep coming. We should have been ashamed of ourselves.
‘I always made it a point of shoplifting from his shop because he was always taking me down if I didn’t watch him. I knew he stole from me and he knew I stole from him. I think over the years we came out about even. It was a game we played together.
‘Johnny Bell and I had big nets, but Bradley had smaller mesh nets so he caught smaller fish. He was an old con-artist so we watched him like a hawk. We came back to Darwin one night when it was cold by Darwin standards. Because of the temperature I just lay my gutted fish out on the grass to keep them cool until dawn. When I got up next morning, I went to get my fish and I could see these big shadowy outlines on the dewy grass where my fish had been. In their place were fish about half the size. He was a hungry old shit. I grabbed my fish back and abused him but all he did was laugh. He never expected to get away with it but he sure got the reaction he wanted. I guess he owed us a bit.
‘I remember one time when we were camping out on Alligator Billabong. We were pretty hungry and all we had to eat were spuds. I was cooking them on the fire. We only had three between us so I ate mine, and Bradley’s, and Colin Powell ate his. Old Bradley’s eyesight was pretty bad so I stuck a pandanus nut in the fire. It was the right size for a spud and he couldn’t see well enough to tell the difference. You can use pandanus nuts for heat beads because they hold their heat well and get red hot. The old bloke carefully turned it over and over in the coals, getting hungrier all the time. After about half an hour he rolled it out of the fire. Poor old Bradley burnt
