The Strength In Us All, page 25
Of course, despite all our intricate precautions, still-building continued for years, and we just had to keep tracking them down and confiscating them.
The next break-out happened when we started to get the abattoir ready for the yearly licence inspection. Dick told Charlie we needed clear plastic tubing for the air-conditioners. The water was dripping out of the drip tray and running down the outside wall and making it rust. So a roll of plastic tubing was bought, and since this wasn’t on the ‘suspect list’ for building stills nothing was thought of it.
How wrong we were. When, once again, Bertha the generator did not herald in the new day, Charles went down the flat to find Dick and Per, and a similar scene as before greeted him.
‘How did they build this still?’ I asked in an incredulous voice, after he’d given me the grisly details. ‘It’s impossible! There’s no way copper tubing could have been brought onto the property!’ I was sure of this, because everyone and everything had to be checked when first arriving on the station.
‘I suppose we’ll soon know,’ said Charles wearily, as he trudged off down the flat to deal with yet another unpleasant situation.
He soon discovered that Dick and Per had patiently replaced all the copper tubing on the various hot water systems in the abattoir, the staff kitchen, bathrooms and laundry and even a few places in the homestead, with plastic tubing. They’d then joined the lengths of copper together, which gave them enough for the next still. All the other parts were readily available.
Finding this still, however, was fairly simple. At first all the stockmen-cum-trackers were very reluctant—Dick and Per had obviously already done their negotiations and the men were therefore uncooperative. Their payment not to find the still, we found out later, was a daily ration of moonshine. But then Charles stopped all the beer rations to everyone, so the extra demand on the still became very heavy and the supply could not keep up with the demand. So once more their silence and their tracking skills were sold for the regular nightly supply of beer.
More copper tubing joined the pile in the locked storeroom.
The moonshine makers of Bullo River then became very cunning and sophisticated and moved indoors. It took quite a while to find the next still, but powers of deduction won through. Having had the trackers range for miles in every direction, Charlie soon realised that even Dick would not walk that far each time he wanted a drink, and therefore it had to be closer to home. We covered every inch of ground within a mile of the workshop … nothing.
‘Maybe, underground?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be silly,’ was Charles’s reply.
‘Well I don’t think it’s silly. It can’t be up, so it must be down, surely?’
‘I have no idea. I’ll just have to stay down in the workshop and watch!’ Charles was truly annoyed now. The prospect of spending a day with Dick and Per recovering from another massive hangover was not attractive.
So once more Charles marched off down the flat to the workshop. It was only a matter of time before they would need another drink. Now they were drinking heavily, if they didn’t have a ‘belt’, as Dick described it, regularly, they would go into the shakes. I’ve seen Dick in this state many times and it does not look at all pleasant. All Charles could do now was play the waiting game. Sooner or later Dick would have to go to the still for a top-up.
‘Have to go and fix the compressor in the abattoir,’ mumbled Dick, in the most businesslike tone he could muster, and he walked gingerly off across the flat, highstepping over imaginary objects as he tried vainly to appear in control of his limbs.
Charles watched him, every step of the way. Per tried to busy himself in the workshop, but spent most of the time pacing up and down or looking over at the abattoir. After about half an hour he couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘I have to go and help Dick,’ he said, and in a rush stumbled off across the flat.
Charles watched Per disappear through the door when he realised that Per had taken off without his toolbox; at the same time it hit him with a jolt, as he sprinted across to the abattoir, that Dick was minus his toolbox as well.
Charles didn’t need trackers to find this still. The moment he entered the abattoir, all eyes of the sober workers looked in alarm towards the door of the meat chiller. Charles opened the chiller door and there in all its glory stood the still; well, it wasn’t quite that easy to find—he had to walk down a row of meat quarters, and there at the very back of the chiller behind the corn beef pickling barrels sat the intoxicated group of Steven, the smallgoods man, Uncle Dick, the number one mechanic, and Per, the 2IC. Actually, by the time Charles arrived, Dick wasn’t sitting any more, but was prone on the floor, almost incoherent, and not at all troubled about Charlie finding the secret still. In fact he asked Charlie to join them.
Being regularly discovered didn’t appear to deter our still-builders in the least. When it became impossible to find copper tubing they just moved into other fields, and a few short cuts came into play.
The first short cut was uncovered when Charles found a very unsteady Uncle Dick weaving his way back to his house after starting the generator late. Dick hotly denied he was drunk, said he had slept in because he had a head cold; but then he breathed on Charles and nearly knocked him unconscious with the fumes he emitted. Charles went on the search. As soon as Dick barred the gate to his house, Charles knew where the next batch of grog was. He was expecting a miniature still in the shower recess, or cupboard. So he wasn’t quite prepared for what greeted him in the fridge. There sat two pumpkins. When Charles opened the door the same overpowering fumes he’d just received from Dick hit him squarely in the face. The pumpkins had been hollowed out and filled with raisins, metho and heavens knows what else.
Charles immediately went on the rampage and found Per also had his own operation going. By now he was so mad he whipped his pistol out of its holster and shot the pumpkins to pieces—and put a few ventilation holes in the wall in the process.
This resulted in no whole pumpkins being sent down to the kitchen, only after they had been cut into four. And the metho joined the copper tubing in the locked storeroom.
But they were far from beaten. The next time Bertha didn’t start on time and Charles took off once more down the flat to find Dick still unconscious from the bout of drinking of the previous night, the evidence was resting by Dick’s side—with more brewing in the fridge. It was a very potent drop, made with coconuts. They had drilled holes in the top and filled the coconut with sugar, plus whatever else, plugged the holes, waited a few days, and ‘down the hatch!’ In the Philippines this mixture is called Tuba, and people say it is so strong it could wipe out the whole weekend.
So now we had to store all coconuts in the storeroom as soon as they were anywhere near ripe. The room was becoming very crowded.
Before we found out about the coconut method Dick asked if he could have some of the coconut plants I was shooting, to plant in his garden. At the time I thought, ‘How nice—he’s planning a garden.’ He was planning all right, but not a garden. On finding this latest ‘still’ Charlie wanted to go and chop down the coconut trees then and there. I told him he didn’t have to hurry, it would be seven years before they had any fruit.
Poor old Dick waited patiently each year for the first crop. He was crestfallen when I told him at least five years. But the years did pass and when D-Day arrived Charles was ready, axe in hand. But he was saved the trouble because the trees were riddled with white ants and just fell over of their own accord months ahead of the expected first crop.
However, one of the funniest ‘still’ stories happened way back in the early days of Bullo. At that stage we had at least five alcoholics on the station, so it was a very busy period chasing stills. This particular one was controlled by Fred, our Italian gardener, with Uncle Dick as consultant. This story proves that if you want to hide something from someone, put it right under their nose.
Charles decided that if we had a fulltime gardener we wouldn’t have to buy any fresh vegetables and would therefore save a lot of money. Well, for many reasons, this plan didn’t work out quite the way Charles expected. Where to start to explain!
Fred’s arrival was very funny. Charles and I had a standing joke—I had read the book The Barefoot Contessa and I always told Charles that she and I were alike: I went around barefoot and my husband didn’t pay me enough attention. She, for many reasons, employed a very tall and dashing gardener, who did more than the gardening. So I always said I too would get myself an Italian gardener. Of course, the children didn’t know the dark and deep side of these remarks, and when one day Charles turned up with Fred, and they thought he had finally done something to please me, they came rushing into the kitchen saying, ‘Quickly Mummy! Daddy has brought you an Italian gardener, for your very own!’
Fred was four-feet-nothing, and hardly the dream man I had in mind. But as Charles said, with a smirk on his face, you wanted an Italian gardener, you’ve got an Italian gardener. I thanked him very much, but said next time I’d pick my own.
So Fred started work—and only as the gardener! He was a dedicated drinker, as well as being good with plants, and soon had an impressive garden plot carved out of the nearest cow paddock. The concept was right—Fred would grow large quantities of the vegetables that grew easily at Bullo. Tomatoes, watermelons, rockmelons, eggplant, beans and bananas were top of the list. What we didn’t use Charles would fly to Darwin to sell to the shops. In the early 1970s fresh fruit and vegies were always in short supply in Darwin; anything fresh came by truck all the way from Adelaide. So Charles could see no reason why we wouldn’t make a lot of money selling the excess crop. There was no way we could lose. But lose we did. For one ton of beautiful, fresh tomatoes, hand-picked and delivered to Darwin, we finally, one week later, received ten dollars, and that sale was for pig food. By the end of the week Charles gave up in disgust. Our venture into market gardening had netted us a mere ten dollars: the tomatoes alone, in seeds, pesticides, Fred’s wages, fertiliser, labour for picking and packing, cost of boxes, fuel to fly them to Darwin, Charles’s time flying, as well as a week as a salesman, truck hire from airport to chiller, one week’s chiller hire, etc, etc, conservatively would’ve cost us a ballpark figure of a few thousand dollars!
So Fred just grew very expensive vegetables for the staff. Because of the heavy demand on various items weekly, such as potatoes, which never made it to the table but ended up in the still, extra had to be purchased. The enormous demand for the ‘dual purpose’ potato was brought under control by sending instant powdered potatoes down to the kitchen. This certainly had an effect on the budget. I had been sending two, and sometimes three, fifty pound bags of potatoes down to the staff kitchen weekly! I was so naive, I didn’t know alcohol could be made with potatoes.
There were other fruit and vegies, such as onions, lettuces and carrots, which couldn’t be used to make alcohol, but which we couldn’t grow enough of to meet the weekly demand. So even though we had a fulltime gardener, we still had to import. And by the time we flew in these extras, added Fred’s wages, plus all the money spent on materials, we found ourselves eating very expensive fresh vegetables indeed!
But there were some things Charles was stubborn about and would not admit defeat, and a vegie garden was one of them, because it reminded him of home. So I was not allowed to mention that maybe it would be cheaper to buy all our fresh produce and not have a fulltime gardener—we were losing money each week by employing Fred, and he was growing far too much, we couldn’t possibly eat it. But Charles was adamant—Fred was staying. And what we couldn’t eat, he told me to just ‘put it up’, the American term for preserving food. I told him I was already working an average day from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., every day, and didn’t think I could fit in an extra hobby, so he bought a very large chest-type deep freeze and told me to cook and freeze everything.
In no time at all the chest freezer was full to the top with tomatoes, corn, beans, and any other vegie that could be frozen. A few weeks later I had to go to Darwin with Charles and while we were away Uncle Dick went on a drinking bender and the power was off for days. The station had recovered from this event by the time we returned, but some stark evidence still remained, namely the deep freeze. It had obviously been used for chilling cases of beer, and some bottles still remained, which had been left to freeze after the drinkers had moved on to spirits and collapsed. The glass bottles had naturally all cracked, or exploded, the generator had run out of fuel and the power stopped.
The power must have been off for days judging by the state of things. When I opened the lid of the freezer the sight was amazing. Tomatoes, beans, corn and carrots had all defrosted; the containers had been pushed around and upturned to accommodate the bottles of beer, so that when the power went off, the contents had poured out of the containers and mixed with beer and broken glass. When Uncle Dick recovered enough to start the generator again, the whole mess just froze solid. So what greeted my eyes was a solid block of coloured ice with pieces of glass and bottle tops sticking out of it, along with corn cobs, stewed tomatoes, string beans and carrots poking out all over the place. The poor guy left in charge to hand out the beer rations was a teetotaller, and said they all appeared late one night, raving drunk, and broke into the storeroom and carted off all the grog. He couldn’t stop them. The fact that they were raving drunk when he had all the grog locked in the storeroom and was only handing out their rations daily was glaring evidence … there was another still!
This one was of Italian design; we have over the years had stills of every nationality—Yugoslavian, Norwegian, Hungarian, German and of course Australian. But this Italian one took the longest to find.
Fred had really done wonders with the garden and he was quite proud of the results. I had to take regular garden tours to admire the progress. He not only produced vegetables in great quantities, but also seemed to produce large quantities of drunks. Charles would burst into the house in a raging temper, ‘They’re drunk again! So drunk Dick can’t even stand!’ and the search would be on. The search would be long and far-reaching, but Charlie would come up with nothing. Of course Dick and associates were enjoying every minute of the whole game. Charles had the stockmen tracking out for miles, but he was working from the workshop and staff area and was on a very cold trail.
Ultimately, it was the drinking club’s smugness that did them in. They had a celebration party, because Charlie couldn’t find their still, and that eventually gave the game away. They were found collapsed in Fred’s caravan, in his garden.
I had often wondered while inspecting Fred’s garden why he had left a large area of tall, thick weeds at one end of an otherwise very neat and precisely laid-out garden. When I questioned him on this his reply was, ‘Itsa to protecta da plants froma da wind!’ This seemed sensible enough, so the wall of weeds stayed. He then always seemed to be burning little fires around the garden and when I asked about this I was told, ‘Itsa da smoke—makes da bugs cough so they no toucha da plants.’ Again, this appeared a reasonable answer, and I thought no more about it.
Charlie really twigged, however, when he was pondering why they would bring the hooch up to Fred’s caravan, right next to the house, when surely they would have wanted to get as far away from us as they could.
‘Unless the hooch is here!’ we both chorused.
Out we went, to Fred’s garden, and there it was. On closer inspection of the wall of weeds there was a well-padded path into the middle of the clump, and there in all its glory sat the still. All the fires set around the rest of the garden were decoys—to hide the smoke coming from the still, while the hooch was brewing. And the solid clump of weeds was a perfect camouflage—you couldn’t see a thing from any side.
Fred’s job that day was to pull out all the weeds and dismantle the still, under Charlie’s supervision.
*
Another of Dick’s mates was Stumpy, the stock camp cook. Stumpy, for many years, and on many occasions, was very much a part of the nefarious still operations, the pumpkin stills, and a few other activities besides. He was an avid gardener, but I found out after he left that he was growing a lot more than vegies. I’m amazed that any machinery on the station worked, with the staff either high on moonshine or pot!
I found out about Stump’s little hobby only last year when a past employee called to see how the station was faring. He rambled on about the days he had worked here and told me the interesting story of why Charles had fired him.
It seems he had told Charlie that Stumpy was growing marijuana in the back of the vegie garden, and much to his surprise Charlie didn’t sack Stumpy but sacked him. He asked Charlie why he got the sack instead of Stumpy, and the story was that Stumpy had told Charlie that he, the stockman, had brought in pot which he was planning to sell to all the staff. Stumpy’s set-up on the other hand, was a coop type arrangement, where everyone could have a bit free!
So the stockman was sent on his way, shaking his head. Stumpy’s plants were destroyed, his job saved, but Charles warned him not to grow any more. Looking back now I am sure more pot was grown—this would explain Stump’s vague periods, when he would disappear and could not be found. Dick would cover for him and say he was down fixing the broken waterpipe. And there were days when Dick himself never made it out of bed. The both of them probably just floated off on a cloud whenever the problems became too much.
There were many times when I thought Dick or Stumpy was acting strange but didn’t seem or smell drunk, now it is all explained!
*
I have to admit, there were quite a few funny stories surrounding Dick’s drinking. One of the funniest was when we had quite a few visiting VIPs. The army was staging a mock war, so there were 600 soldiers racing around the valley; as well as twenty girls from the Wilderness School, visiting on an Outward Bound exercise, and the American ambassador and his entourage for the weekend. His entourage comprised two CIA men, a pilot and co-pilot, and two staff.
