Cops, Crocs & Leopard-Skin Jocks. Bob Magor
real education started the same day. Look out, world!’
The motor sprang into life at the back of the boat.
‘All you’re doing is wasting bait, you wanker. Don’t take up fishing to make a quid,’ Roy grinned. ‘Let’s get back to camp and see what those other lazy bastards got in their pots. You haven’t caught any breakfast but I s’pose I’ll find you something!’
Back in camp the morning’s catch was off-loaded into the cool crab shed and hosed down. The other boats had excelled themselves so Roy was in high spirits. He was also happy because there was another toyota behind the shed. It belonged to his brother-in-law, and my shearer, allan sluggett and Roy’s sister anne. They’d come up from near me at Yankalila to help Roy with the crabs.
Allan is a legend down south. A mountain of a man around sixty with a bit of hair missing from his head these days – it has all been redistributed over the rest of his body, giving him a fur coat. A man with an evil sense of humour, he could turn his hand to anything and be successful. He loved this lifestyle in the Gulf as much as Roy. Anne was shortish like her brother and these days she was having a bit of a problem with gravity. Anne always kept threatening to go on a diet and slim down a bit but, being a great cook, she kept them both in prime condition.
After all the hugs and back-slapping Roy stirred up the fire and dropped a huge cast iron frying pan on the mesh. Eggs and bacon, with toast cremated on the grill, was to become breakfast and lunch I soon found out. The two dogs circled about four feet away, looking hopeful. That was the distance they had learnt from bitter experience as the cut-off line between tolerance and abuse during meals. The other ‘camp doggies’ weren’t allowed anywhere near Roy’s kitchen so they disappeared to their dwellings to fix their own meals.
As we settled down for a feed Anne started telling me about Roy’s youth.
‘He didn’t care who he stepped on to earn a quid,’ she began, ‘but he was always honest with his mates. He always treated people fairly unless they did the dirty on him first. Like Cliffy England who owned one of the local stores in Port Noarlunga. Roy would bring in soft drink bottles to him for the two-penny deposit but Cliffy would only give him one penny for any bottles that didn’t have a label on them. Roy accepted this at the time but years later he realised the old chap had fleeced him. Roy then got even. He’d steal Californian Poppy hair oil among other things from Cliffy’s store and retail them himself. For Roy, this was just simple logic in getting his own back on a man who had taken advantage of him as a kid. He got all his back pay plus a lot more.
‘Another old store-keeper called Lenny Roberts owned two other shops in town but Roy never stole from him because he’d always done the right thing by him.
At that stage in his life, Roy believed in right and wrong where people were concerned and worked on the “eye for an eye” theory.’
Anne told me that by 1960 things were getting a bit hot for Roy in South Australia and it had nothing to do with the weather. He’d grown into a dynamo of mischief. Not overly tall but very athletic, he’d learnt to use his fists and enjoyed unleashing them with very little provocation. He was good looking and charismatic, a hit with the girls and he was idolised by his inner circle of mates but feared by anybody with any sense.
‘Roy continued to rebel against any sort of authority, mainly bosses and the police. He couldn’t hold a permanent job because of personality clashes which led him into petty crime. Eventually the Law always became involved. So here he was at twenty-one, having spent well over three years of his young life incarcerated, trying to sort out his future. He had the dubious distinction of having every Christmas and mid-January birthday since he was fifteen behind bars. Roy didn’t know it then but this yearly holiday would continue until he was twenty-five.
‘Because of his anti-social behaviour and his record he was always in the sights of the police. Whenever a policeman caught sight of him they rightly assumed that he was either going to, or coming back from, something illegal. They’d book him for consorting even if he was on the other side of the street. Minor defects on his vehicle or even swearing in a public place were petty charges to make his life uncomfortable.’
‘I’d had enough,’ Roy chipped in. ‘I couldn’t move without a copper breathing down my neck. Leo Maine, a good mate of mine, owned a Standard Ten station wagon. It had a hole in the block so we filled it up with red lead in his back yard and it seemed as good as new. Leo was keen to see other parts of Australia so he didn’t take much convincing that he should take his girlfriend, Annette Wilson, and me to look for greener pastures in Western Australia. We had no idea how far it was or what to expect. We just took off.
‘The trip across the Nullarbor was horrific. The old Standard Ten had a hard time with the corrugations and the bulldust and so did we. The road was only used by a few trucks and buses in those days and if you were travelling in a car you really had to have a good reason for making the trip. But it was good camping out under the stars. The trip took a lot longer than we’d anticipated because none of us had ever seen a road like that before. We were very relieved when the old Standard Ten finally limped into Norseman.
‘I had no money but I felt great now the trip was over and my companions had convinced me to go straight. WA was a chance for a fresh start where nobody knew me or my past.
‘There was nothing on offer in Kalgoorlie so we headed up through the cropping country. It was winter time and all the farms looked great. We didn’t know much about farming but they all looked pretty good to us. We were heading into the open spaces when we drove into the little town of Yalgoo. A bloke in the shop told us they were looking for workers at Mount Magnet about fifty miles to the west.
‘We didn’t take long to decide to hit the track in that direction. And it was a track. We groaned as we did battle with the dust and corrugations again. We almost made it but the poor battered Standard Ten finally gave up the ghost with about ten miles to go. We pronounced it dead and while we were wondering what our next move would be, or if we were going to die out there, a bloke came along and gave us a lift into town in his truck.
‘We were standing in the mess at the Mount Magnet mine inquiring about jobs when a copper strolled in. It’s amazing how coppers can sum up a person by his looks – and this one definitely didn’t like the look of me. He was very cold and aloof as he questioned us about our movements and what our intentions were in town. The fact that we were looking for work didn’t impress him much but out of the blue he asked, “Do you blokes play Aussie Rules?” When I mentioned that I’d played for Port Noarlunga he changed his tune immediately. “There’s three teams here in town,” he said as he glared at me. “There’s Towns, Mines and Bigardi. If you play for Towns, that’s my team, you can stay. Otherwise piss off. Please yourself.” We were in and I played football on this oval of red dirt, stones and prickles. You made sure you never fell down or else you lost a lot of skin and picked bindies out of your hide for the next week. It was good fun though and we had the best team. That was probably due to the copper’s novel brand of recruitment.
‘We clocked on at Hill 50 Gold Mine and when I went underground for the first time all the walls were glistening. Everything that shone I prised out and put in my pocket. This is okay, I thought to myself. A bloke could make a tidy profit here! When I got back to the surface I asked a miner what I had. He rolled on the ground laughing and told me I was a stupid mug because all I’d stolen was pyrites and it was completely worthless. There went my plans of making a fortune.
‘My work at Hill 50 was mainly on a Grizzly. They’d drop big rocks onto a grid and the ones that wouldn’t go through I had to break up with a sledgehammer so they would. Pushing hand trucks and smashing rocks made me super fit and during my stay there was the best football I ever played.
‘We worked there for four months. In that time I learnt to work an air bogger, a little