Cops, Crocs & Leopard-Skin Jocks. Bob Magor
a clear conscience I limped on towards Broome.
‘Ah, Broome in the ‘60s,’ Roy sighed. ‘What an idyllic place. There again, when I went back on that trip in ‘76, I couldn’t believe it. I bought myself a handline and some bait and went out on the Broome jetty. There were hundreds of tourists there with cameras around their necks. I threw the bait over the edge followed by my line and never went back. It wasn’t the Broome that I remembered. I was sure disillusioned. That’s why I love where I live these days. Peace.
‘Broome then was a beautiful multicultural town. There were whitefellas, blackfellas, Chinese, Japanese, Malay and mixtures of some or all of them. Everyone did their own thing and everybody got on. They all had their own customs and tucker and I loved it because it was laid back and you could get away with almost anything. I remember going to a Chinese joint one day with two bob and winning twenty pounds on kudja kudja. That’s their version of dominos. I didn’t know much about it. I just put my money where someone who was winning put his.
‘When I was first in Broome my best clothes were a pair of leopard skin underpants. They weren’t real leopard skin of course – just the pattern. Being a lair, I wore them around the streets and shops and in the pub. They really got the girls in. They looked like bathers and became my trademark. Naturally I didn’t work in them. They were just my best going out clobber. No-one cared. That was the old Broome.
‘Joanna was back in Port Hedland and I’d been hooking up with black girls for a while. In fact I never had a white girl after I left South Australia. This is something I’ve been completely comfortable with all my life. When I got to the Top End it became almost compulsory. I remember many years later when Annie here asked me the reason why I loved black girls, she looked shocked when I said it was because you never saw the varicose veins on the backs of their legs.’
‘You’ve always been hopeless, you big log,’ Anne grinned lovingly at her brother.
‘I couldn’t think of any other excuse,’ Roy laughed. ‘The real reason is probably because the young ones are plentiful and pretty. Anyway, over the years no white woman would have put up with me.
‘While I was in Broome I lived with the Aborigines again. It just seemed to be the natural thing to do. I teamed up with a girl by the name of Angie James. We eventually had the first child that I ever knew about. A girl called Josephine. I haven’t seen her for years but she always rings up every few months to see how I’m going. She’s a lovely girl. Must take after her mother!
‘I started working on the wharf in Broome and that was a good lurk. It’s strange that I could never take a job at face value. There always had to be an angle. It was a typical wharf situation where anything that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were, would get knocked off on a regular basis. This was my sort of job. The State boats delivered everything for the town the same as they did at Derby because there were no road deliveries. The roads were a joke so no-one in their right mind would take a truck up there on a regular basis. Anyway, the boats were quicker. I’d be down in the hold loading freight into slings and other blokes would swing the load up onto the wharf. You worked for half an hour and had twenty minutes off. It was a shame to take the money!
‘Because I always worked on the “give me an inch I’ll take a mile” theory, it wasn’t long before I went overboard with the pilfering and got the sack. The local businesses smelt a rat when half their order didn’t turn up on a regular basis. It didn’t take them long to find the rat.
‘After that I got a job as a yardman in a Broome pub. That worked out okay because one of my jobs was to mop the bar out at 5am. The pub used to sell little flat bottles of rum. I’d lift a few and smuggle them out past the boss in the mop bucket full of dirty water. I’d water it down and make two bottles to flog to the blackfellas for a huge profit. Well, it was 100% profit!
‘Later on in my Broome days I’d go to the pub and buy a flagon of plonk. Then I’d find some empty bottles and make six bottles – half plonk and half water. The blackfellas were happy to pay a quid a bottle for my brew and I survived like that for quite a while. My Broome days were from 1960 until the end of 1963. I know that because I’ve got “Angie 63” tattooed on my leg. I’m a walking calendar.
‘Before we had the baby, Angie and I were living in a tent and when I won my kudja kudja money I bought an old kerosene fridge to go in it. I thought I was a king.
‘I had a big scare in Broome though. By this time I was living in the old bank building in the main street. I got into a fight with a big blackfella in town. He was bigger and older than me. I was about twenty-three and he was about thirty-eight but he’d been drinking so that took the edge off him. We were into it hammer and tongs in the street when this young blackfella ran up. He must have been a relation of my opponent because he threw a fighting stick at me but fortunately it missed and it hit the department store window behind me. It bounced back so I grabbed it and chased the bastard. I was lean in those days and could run like hell.
‘When I caught up to him I ran up alongside and laid it across his head. The force of the blow dropped him but he sprang to his feet and took off. As he ran away, all I could see in the moonlight was a white piece of bone. I’d opened his hair up and exposed a heap of skull. When I saw that I panicked. I ran to the cop shop and told the cop on duty I’d just killed a bloke. I was actually crying telling the cop about it.
‘We went back but there was no-one there. We searched the backstreets for an hour but in the end we gave up. For weeks after that the blackfellas would come around in the dark and rattle their sticks on the corrugated iron fence. It made quite a racket in the humid night. I never had any physical trouble from the nightly visits but I was a bit worried for a while knowing that the gang was out there. Eventually they got sick of it and stopped. I’d seen enough of the lad to recognise him if I ever saw him again but I never set eyes on him. I kept looking for him around the streets and checking for someone with a big bandage around their head but I never saw him. Perhaps he cleared out bush or perhaps he died. All I know was that it was a very traumatic time in my life.
‘I didn’t want to leave Broome but I had to when I eventually caught my usual disease – bloody coppers. I decided that the only cure was to take a holiday. I hadn’t seen anything of the Territory, so I decided to take a drive in my Customline. It was starting to show signs of a hard life but it still ran well. My mate Norman Munro decided to come for some sightseeing, and other friends Theresa Torrence and her boyfriend came along for the ride as well. We motored and camped our way across to Katherine checking out all the sights on the way. We felt like bloody tourists!
‘Instead of staying on the main highway we decided to see some real bush and turned off the Stuart Highway heading for Top Springs. The Buchanan Highway had just been completed so it wasn’t a bad road. We refuelled at Top Springs but between there and Wave Hill the car shit itself. Even though it was a new road there was very little traffic in those days so we were stranded and we didn’t know for how long. We hadn’t passed a car in two days because it was only used for the station people heading into civilisation on their rare breaks. This was before the damn tourists began to rip around every outback track in their big four-wheel drives pretending to be explorers.
‘Looking back we were fairly stupid because we had very little water on board. We all had a little drink and Munro said, “Come on. We’ll walk to a bore and get some more. There must be one around here somewhere because the cattle have to drink and we’ve seen lots of cattle pads.” Like idiots the two of us took the water bag and began to walk. Theresa and her boyfriend decided to stay with the car so if anyone came along they could tell them where to find us.
‘I started to lose interest in sightseeing as Day One came and went. It was bloody hot and we saw nothing that resembled a water hole. Just heat and flies. Millions of bloody flies. There were lots of cattle tracks but they didn’t appear to be going anywhere specific. Usually when tracks get near water they start to join up and become bigger tracks. We had hats on but the heat seemed to have burned through them and dried out our brains. Our meagre supply of water had run out mid-afternoon and we discussed following our tracks back to the car. We decided against it. We had no water to give them when we got back so we’d all just