Chuff-chuff-chuffing through the bush

SPEAKER_12 0:00

G'day, I'm John Francis. Pull up a gum leaf. Welcome to the Red Dust Tapes Campfire, where we'll sit around listening to fascinating outback characters of the early 20th century recorded by me long ago. Chuffing through the bush, in which we rock and rattle back into the early days of Australian rail, including The Railways was vital.

SPEAKER_04 0:44

Number one, they were vital in the shearing industry, all right, because before the the railways came through, people were on horseback. Later on they were on cycle, bicycles. But when the railways, and they always planned to go back home, see their loved ones, and a lot of them tragically would go to the nearest pub or shanty.

SPEAKER_12 1:04

I read an account of the flies, the dust, and the isolation by a man who was right there with pick and shovel for the building of the Nullabore Railway, the transcontinental. And then we rattle along to a later era for the early days of diesel. And life in a tiny settlement in the middle of that desolate nullaboar track.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Good, free, and easy life out of you. Nothing much to do over weekends, so you just wander out in the bush. Nobody to bother you.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

There must be a lot of people that come from large cities, come out to make some money, but do find it very hard to settle in. Oh yeah, there's a heck of a lot of them.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Matter of fact, we've got a few in the camp at the moment.

SPEAKER_11 1:59

A lot of the women, they uh like the younger ones, they get very depressed, you know. They end up getting on their nerve tablets or something. They the biggest part of them come from the city. Well, they find it very hard to adjust to this kind of life. And they get depressed, and there's arguments, and the women want to go back, and then the men they want to stop out of you. Well, I was like that at first.

How Australian colonies ended up with three different rail gauges

Railways, the saviour of the shearers

SPEAKER_12 2:30

I'll tell you a funny story about the steam engine recording. I was in Perth, not sure when, probably about 1971. I was wandering along the street downtown when I heard what was that? A steam whistle. I went down to the railway yards and sure enough there was an old shunting engine huffing and crying into the air. Right oh. I phoned the main Perth railway number, was put through to someone somewhere, I told them that I was a journalist, and could I please get a ride on the steam shunting engine to capture the sound? The person was incredulous. We don't have steam in Perth anymore. Well listen, I said, What's that machine in the shunting yards? Later that day I was in among the clatter bang and steamy coal smells on the plate of the old girl recording the stuff. Back in nineteen sixty-seven, I was briefly, before I got the sack for being useless, the first newsreader at television station GTS 4 in Port Perry in South Australia. This was back when television was still in glorious black and white, and because there was no video recording, I'd have to jump out in front of the camera and do the same commercial several times each night. Anyway, when I wasn't being paid for being incompetent, I'd sometimes sit in a little coffee shop in Port Peary's main street, and occasionally the quiet moments in this narrow little shopping strip would be obliterated by this sound. Yes, the freight trains would clatter puff their way through here, past the cafe, past the post office, past the habadashery shop on their way to the port, whacking the citizens towards deafness and giving them a reason to change their clothes when they got home. Yes, yes, all right, you steam train nutters. That particular recording was of an engine going way faster than it would be if it was going through a shopping area. It's called Gilding the Lily for a bit of dramatic effect, all right. Now here's a very interesting thing. I lived not far down the road at the back of an SP bookie joint. It was a road with a level crossing, a level crossing with a very special claim to fame. This crossing had three different railway gauges narrow gauge, that's three foot six inches, standard gauge, that's four foot eight and a half, and broad gauge, five foot three inches. Yep, these were the three track widths that Australia had, and to a degree still has today, and going right back to the days of our first railways. Whose stupid idea was this? Actually there were several stupid people in different Australian colonies. Way back in eighteen forty five, Britain had mandated the standard gauge four foot eight and a half. That news obviously filtered through to Australia, but somehow the various colonial authorities and individual railway companies found reasons to agree and to disagree. It would be 1995 before all Australian state capitals were joined by standard gauge, but away from these main connections there still remain an awful lot of lines on the other gauges. One line that was still using narrow gauge in the late 1960s when I was collecting my stories, was the old line from Maury in northern South Australia to Alice Springs. This was before the new standard gauge was built further west, which bypassed Maury, and incidentally took the railway line right the way through from Alice Springs to Darwin. Back then on the old narrow gauge line, it was a slow and wobbly ride as it meandered largely through sand hill country. I once travelled on this old line from Maury to Utnadatta on a mixed train, goods and passengers. The guard had many yarns. I like this one. On days of extreme heat, the train had to slow down so much that you could shoot a rabbit through the open window, hop out to retrieve it, and jump back on while the train was still passing. But what was the really early history of Australian railway?

SPEAKER_04 8:13

The railways was vital. Number one, they were vital in the shearing industry, all right, because before the the railways came through, people were on horseback. Later on they were on cycle bicycles.

SPEAKER_12 8:26

This is early Australian music collector, history researcher and performer Warren Fay.

SPEAKER_04 8:32

But when the railways, and they always planned to go back home, see their loved ones, you know, take their seasons check and go back to the city or wherever they came from. And a lot of them tragically would go to the nearest pub or shanty, hand the check over, and the um the it was unwritten law that that the landlord or landlady would let them drink for three days before they threw them in the dead house at the the room at the back of the pub, and then they'd write them uh a check for what was remaining of their seasons check. It was a tragedy. It was called Lambing Down, you know, fleecing the young lambs. And there are a few songs about this lambing down, and it it persisted even in the cities right up to before World War One started, uh, where the the the the shearers or the itinerant workers would be flashed with money and they'd come in and the they the landlady or landlords saw it as their obligation to get sort of try and get the the money out of them as best they can and as much as they could. I mean it was a tragedy in the bush, let me tell you.

Amusing early railways songs

SPEAKER_05 9:42

It's all for me beer and tobacco. Well I spent all meeting in a shantydering now across the western plains I must walk.

SPEAKER_04 10:07

It wasn't until the railways came through that they could hop on a train and they could get somewhere. Um so that's for me one of the most important things. Um but it was a trial putting a railway through such a big country, as you can imagine, and certainly in New South Wales, where they did a railway, they started it in 1850 to go from Sydney to Parramatta, where the other big settlement was, and it was only 14 miles, uh, but it took five years to finish because they kept bringing out shiploads of railway navies who'd worked on railways in England and Ireland, and they'd arrive and um they'd hear of the gold rush. And they said, Well, am I bloody well working on a railway? I could be going out and picking out bumps of gold, and they'd hot foot it, probably pinch the shovel and pick they were working with and hot foot it up to the gold fields. And the same thing happened in in Victoria.

SPEAKER_07 11:08

Digging holes in the ground where there's gold to be found, and most times where gold is not. A man's like a rabbit with his digging habit, and like one he ought to be shot.

SPEAKER_04 11:23

The railway has a very important part, uh role in Australia's history, and of course, there were lots of songs about railways, lots about railway strikes, lots about the railway refreshment rooms, which were really important um uh with the the story of the railway. Um, there was a great song that came out of um Queensland in the uh in the 1950s by a group called the Brisbane Realist Writers Group, I think it was called. It was published in a very early book called the Queensland centenary pocket songbook, but it um it had lines, it was once again, it's pretty much doggeral. Um, on the Queensland Railway lines, there are stationed where once dines. Private individuals also run refreshment rooms, Bogan Tung and Rolling Stone, Mungamergen Marathon, Garthamonga, Pinkin Bar, Wanko Yamba, ha ha ha. You know the tune. And then it's got uh pies and coffees, baths and showers are supplied at charters towers at Mackay the rule prevails of restricting shows to males. Iron rations come in handy on the way to Diran Bandy. Passengers have died of hunger during halts at Garadunga. Let us toast before we part those who travel stout of heart, drunk or sober, rain or shine on the Queensland railway line, Togan Tung Rolling Stone, Munger Murgan Marathon, Garda Lungra, Pink and Bar, Wanko Yamba, ha ha ha.

SPEAKER_12 13:18

As Warren says, a fun song, but really just doggeral. So were there any songs that offered insight into railways and the way of life?

A railway ditty that's a bit blue

SPEAKER_04 13:27

Not much. I don't think so. The stories my favorite story about the railways, without a doubt, is um, you know, the railway refreshment rooms, the triple R, which were famous. The train would slow down and the guard would say, Ten minutes, ladies and gentlemen, the tea and coffee and pies and sandwiches are ready in the railway refreshment room. And then everybody would stampede down to these little railway refreshment rooms, and these waitresses would be there all waiting. Anyway, this fella comes in and uh he looks at the waitress, he's not obviously not having a good morning. She goes, What do you want? And um he goes, Um, a couple of kind words. What do you want? Oh, I'll have the pie. Uh and he she looks at him, he looks at him, and uh he says, How much? She says, Two shillings, and he passes it over, and he said, uh, and uh anything else you'd recommend? Don't eat the pie.

SPEAKER_12 14:35

Coming back to railway songs for a moment, here's a little ditty from Warren's collection, which no doubt was a favourite in pubs and in the settlers' camps at night after a few beers. But if you're a little tender, I do urge you to cover your ears for the last part.

Building the Transcontinental Railway in 1914

SPEAKER_04 14:54

This is uh, you know, the railway nabbies, they they were renowned drinkers and they used to a bit like the sailors had a girl in every port, they had a girl in every town. Um and there was a ditty that went to the tune of like it was an old bush dance tune, actually. I'm a nabby, I'm a nabby, I'm a nabby on the line. I get four and twenty Bob a week besides me over time. All the ladies love the nabbies, and the nabbies love their fun. There'll be lots of little nabbies when the railway's done. Some like the girls who are slender in the waist, others like the girls who are pretty in the face. I like the girl who'll take it in her fist and shove it right home into the magpie's nest.

Hard stories from building the Transcontinental

Recollections of Cook, now a ghost town

SPEAKER_12 15:49

I want to take you now across to the Nullabor Plain, to the building of what must surely be the most unique line in Australia. The Nullabor Line is one thousand seven hundred and ten kilometres from Port Augusta in South Australia to Kalgoolie in Western Australia, part of the Transcontinental Railway Line. The majority is over real desert country, and its name gives you a clue null arbor, no trees, for the vast majority of the distance anyway. And it has a very special claim to fame with the longest straight stretch of line in the world, 478 kilometres. And while it replaced the camel as the only really viable means for transport out there, it was largely thanks to the camel that it could be built in the first place. They hauled the loads, and they and horse teams, dragging scoops, smoothed and heaped the earth to form the bed for the railway sleepers. Patsy Adams Smith, a wonderful chronicler of earlier days in Australia, wrote a fabulous book called Folklore of the Australian Railway Men. One of the people featured in her book is Bill Twilley, who said he started work on the construction of the line in 1914. Bill was a labourer and then a train driver. Here are excerpts from his letters to Patsy. It was a tough job. I doubt if we will ever see again. Men work under the conditions men on the Trans Australia did with horses, camels, shovels and picks. Remember that on this 900 miles not one stream of water crossed. No man lived. Well, okay. Ignoring the Aboriginal people, but that's what they did in those days. No man lived, and the land was so flat, no tunnel had to be built, and no bridge across gulches. We lived in tent houses, sometimes wood part way up with canvas top, sometimes a cutting in the earth, with a tent above that. Willy willies, when they came, swept in and blew the top off of these houses. I saw a man near our tent house left standing amongst his furniture with his roof gone in the wind of the willy willy. Even as a line was built, we had to use sand scoops fastened on the front of a slow moving train to keep the sand off the line. We kept flour, baking powder, pepper, salt on hand, in case we were cut off, and of course vinegar and onions for the turkeys. We used to get about two wild turkeys a week. We'd rub them with vinegar and put an onion inside them and hang them out for a bit and then cook them in a kerosene tin. They were good eating. We kept our food cool by digging a hole in the ground. There were a few settlers scattered over the Nullabor near Pimba, and they'd come out with camels hitched to their buggies. The ladies would sit there in their long white dresses and big hats. Lots of people thought camels would be more important than the new cars out there away from the railhead. I saw an Afghan sell eight camels for a hundred pounds each. Few of the settlers were doing more than live on their overdraft. The railway at Pimber gave work to the men and their horses that had been driven off the land up Cornway, where the sand rolled in and hid their land, fences, houses, everything in the big drought that was all over Australia in nineteen fourteen. They'd never known it easy, and now they knew it even harder still. Some said railway work was better than farming, not so lonely, and it wasn't like working for a hard boss. A good ganger on these lines would overlook a lapse of a day on the booze, or crook with a hangover. When a man turned up next morning he'd say Now let's get a day's work out of you, and by God they gave it to him. As the line moved further out, men shifted camp every couple of weeks to keep near the work. A butcher bread and stores train came out once a week with fresh provisions, but we had nowhere to store food, no ice or anything, and in that heat, often over a hundred degrees in the shade, the bread was a rock in one day, and we had to eat the meat the day we got it. Later, when I began to work the engines, I'd be on that tea and sugar train, and we'd take a long time to get out to the railhead in the dark, and we'd come along near where we knew there was a camp and blow the whistle, and out they'd come with hurricane lamps from their tents, men and women with sugar bags to carry their foodstuffs in. The butcher's van had a section for live sheep, for slaughtering, a counter as a shop, and at one end there was the butcher's bed, but as we stopped every half hour or so at a camp, I don't think he got much sleep. We had a few second hand engines from the New South Wales Railways to build the line, and we only had boar water to use, and this ate away the copper plates and the tubes in the boilers. The tubes would then leak, and we'd be hours late, steam blowing out over our faces and into the fire, preventing it from getting up any steam, and we'd have to stop and take on more water, and we'd eventually get to Port Augusta and they'd be waiting for our engine to take the next train out. They'd have men waiting to knock the fire out, blow the steam from the boiler, and I've seen boiler makers getting bags to stand on or sit on on the hot metal as they tried to repair the boiler tubes. The engines were so poor and the bore water so bad for them that loco depots were put along the line. They were staffed by a fitter and a mate, a boiler maker and mate, and a fuel man to coal the engine. There were loco depots at roughly every hundred miles. Some of the crews brought their families out to these depots. It was hard living for a woman. The navies on the line had a hard life. They lived in tents with an old wire streak. Stretcher, water in a kerosene tin, no shower, but a half and a half bath once a week. For this you got a kerosene tin of water. You put a bag on the dirt floor beside it, you put your right leg in and wash that side of your body, then stepped out and put your left leg in and washed that side. Then you used the water to wash your clothes. That was Sunday work. When my wife and two children came out with me to wear a mimic, I put up two tents for us. We had a couple of stretches, a bedding, a table, two chairs, a frying pan, and a billy can. I dug a hole in the ground for a fire, and hung the billy over that for a cup of tea, and said, Well, mum, that's home. There was no other woman there. A mile away was a black camp, about a hundred of them with dogs, and they'd come around our camp to cadge for food. But they'd be lucky if they got any, because we only got ours once a week. There was no doctor. The men had a bottle of the painkiller, two shillings a bottle, and you took a few drops in water when you got sick in the stomach, and you had epsom salts for the weekend. Not too sure why they needed that on a weekend, but anyway. I had a little flask of brandy, eucalyptus, and olive oil, and I'd mix that in a bottle as an embrocation. When the children got a cold, I'd warm the bottle in warm water and rub their chests and backs, and put them into bed in the tents. When they got a bit sick, I would warm a little water over the candle, put it in a spoon with a little sugar and brandy, and we didn't trouble the doctor for twenty years. The further the line got out, the harder it was for the old engines. Soon as the line got well into the desert lands, we were full time trying to keep the water and coal up to them. The stables along the line for the two hundred horses that were worked there came in very handy. We always carried a bag of horse manure, and if the tubes in the boiler started to leak, we forced water and manure into the boiler, and it would force the leeks to take up and help get the train home. They certainly had their incidents on the line, that's for sure. Here's a beauty. This day we had two engines in trouble, so they made a double header out of it, and set off to take the train with the pay car out to the camps. Arthur Jones, one of the pommy drivers, he was driving one, and Bernie McBride the other. And we're rapper, they had to pick up a truck. The guard got off to shunt, and he needed a little bump to get his truck to couple up. But the foreman saw the green light, and he said, Right away, Arthur. He whistled the second engine, right away, and off they went, leaving the guard and the truck behind them at Werrapper. There's a bit of a rise out there, and Arthur Jones said to his foreman, By Jove, we're going well. Old Barney's putting in well. On the engine behind, Barney was saying to his fireman, Arthur's doing a good job tonight. When they got to birthday siding, Arthur was oiling his engine, and one of the men from the gang came up and said, Where's the pay van? On the other end of the train, said Arthur. No, it's not. I've been there. Arthur said, It's a long train, you didn't walk far enough. Then the station master came up and told him that he'd lost half his train. In the construction days there was always someone who's ly grogging, and this 125-mile camp was the worst of them all. It was in a hollow. Three hundred men were camped there, there was no hygiene or sanitation. The butcher killed his sheep there beside the tent boarding houses, and flies in their thousands were there. There was a long camp made of bags. That was the gambling school. On payday, the men would start up with two up. When it got dark, they'd use kerosene lamps and they'd play dice all night, and go on until they were broke, and some would get on the drink, and the next day they'd be so desperate for a bottle, and the sly grog chaps would come out. They'd sell grog for twenty shillings a bottle, a lot of money when the pay was about twelve shillings a day, and it'd be a mixture of whiskey, methylated spirits, and water. Any camp without women was bad, but this was the worst loneliness because of the country these men had to work in. Some of them went mad. Sammy Morgan cut his throat and his wrists when he was on the DTs. The horse stables were opposite the camp, and they attracted the flies too. A fever broke out, and each day men would be going down with it. We took them to Port Augusta, and when the hospital was full, we put them in an old railway carriage, and then in a little room in the main street. Sometimes they lay out in the paddock on their stretches. A few died. There was a policeman stationed at each of the big camps to keep law and order, but like an old mining town, these camps had a law of their own. If one of the men was no good, the others got on to him. They were used to the bush, working, sleep and talking to the flies, all the same day in and day out. They didn't need a policeman to keep an order in the camps, and most of the police knew it and got on well with the navvies. But one policeman tried to alter their ways and stopped the two-up. He was warned to get away from the school, but he would interfere. Next time they moved camp to keep up with the railhead, they loaded all the tents except his. The ganger told them they must load the police tent. They said he could load his own. The ganger talked him into loading it, but the train had only gone a couple of miles along the way when a fire broke out. The policeman's tent was on fire. The sound of the diesel electric loco replaced steam across the Nullabor in 1951. And I spent a bit of time across the Nullabor from about 1969 to 1971. So coming up is a little radio documentary I made about Cook, a tiny railway settlement, a smack bang in the middle of that line. The conditions were much more civilized than when Bill Twilley was describing it. But it was still pretty basic. It was an isolated, lonely life, especially for the fettlers camps, where just a handful of men would be stationed. And the fettlers were a ragtag mix of humanity. Many had dark reasons for hiding away from civilization. I can remember back in the sixties and seventies, there'd be some sort of violent incident, including a murder or two, in one of these tiny collections of men-only tin huts, isolated as they were out on the endless, windswept, cold or hot as hell, endless, endless, treeless plain.

SPEAKER_14 29:11

Outside the railway carriage, the earth is like coarse yellow sandpaper. There's nothing to be seen out of the south windows, and nothing out of the north. And up front of the train, beyond the engine, nothing. Behind the guards van, nothing. Just flatness stretching out to every horizon and cut in two by the endless, bendless silver railway. Alongside the track stands a small brick railway station. Behind it, a dozen houses with wide verandahs shine in the heat. A two-roomed schoolhouse stands apart from the houses. And on a pole in the schoolyard, the blue Australian flag hangs limp like a thirsty tongue.

SPEAKER_12 30:21

This is Cook, the halfway point of the Nullabor Railway. Now, in my little documentary, since this was decades before digital communication, it's amusing to hear how the stationmaster kept in touch with the train traffic.

SPEAKER_16 30:37

Cook. Could I have an order for train number 673 fast goods to Kalgooli, please?

SPEAKER_04 30:45

Yes, right, Alan.

unknown 30:46

Train order 597.

SPEAKER_14 30:48

The station master sits in his office and telephones Port Augusta. He's expecting another train soon, this time bound from east to west. And he's seeking information about the train from the control center.

SPEAKER_16 31:00

Cross Mixed 536, F I V E T H R E S I X, Engine GM18, O and E I G H T. Stop your train at the 571 F I V E S E V N O N E mile, 700, S E V N N A G H T chain, until hand signal forward account relaying gang. Received at Cook at 117 p.m. Repeated from Cook at 118 p.m. P. Wallace train controller Lar Hickey Station Master. Thank you, Phil.

unknown 31:32

I'm M Gut.

SPEAKER_16 31:35

I was speaking to Port Augusta, some 513 miles from me here at Cook, and he is the man who controls all the trains running from or between Port Augusta and Calgoole. He is the man who knows where every train is at any given moment. And safety is the major factor here. There are many men working on the railway line. These people must know where the trains are. The driver must know what's in front of him. Everything is double-checked so as that the safety factor is never overlooked. To make sure that you don't have two trains running headlong into one another, this is something we can never afford to have.

SPEAKER_14 32:20

The next train won't be through for an hour or so, so the station master walks home for some lunch. He's a short, round little man with a ruddy face and a casual manner. Instead of the usual station master's cap, he wears a floppy orange wash hat. He looks like a friendly wombat as he ambles across the wide stretch of dust and rocks between the station and his house.

SPEAKER_16 32:43

I'm quite happy with the railways. I enjoy the work, and um my family, uh their railway mind it also, because this is our life here. There's nothing else other than railways. They know all the train numbers, and uh we have uh quite a good time out here. We really enjoy it.

SPEAKER_14 33:00

Yes, I suppose your your whole the lives of everyone, not just the people who work in the railways, the the the fathers, but uh the children and the wives would very much their lives would revolve around the uh the railways and the trains that pass by.

SPEAKER_08 33:12

Yes, they do, because uh that's the employment that the husband is in, and uh so naturally everyone's involved in in that in is in the families and involved in the with the railways in some way.

SPEAKER_14 33:22

Plus the fact that there's not very much else to look at except trains.

SPEAKER_08 33:26

No, there's very little else, plus apart from trains, it's uh you know not much else, just a few houses, and but that's the only activity really is the trains that are going through.

SPEAKER_15 33:38

Well, gentlemen, your train will be arriving at uh quarter to uh two.

SPEAKER_14 33:43

The westbound goods train is due shortly, so it's time for the station master to call the relieving train crew from their rest house.

SPEAKER_18 33:51

Okay, we're going straight away?

SPEAKER_16 33:53

We're going straight away. You're going to cross it, Hughes with the um clean sugar.

SPEAKER_18 33:57

Any shunt?

SPEAKER_16 33:58

No shunt at Cook.

SPEAKER_18 33:59

Okay, well, let's go.

SPEAKER_14 34:01

It takes four different crews to drive a train on the long nullaboard journey, and the Cook Rest House is one of several at different points along the line where off-duty crews can eat and sleep.

SPEAKER_17 34:14

Uh how did I say how long it was? It looks to be about it looks to be about 50 in length.

SPEAKER_14 34:20

The train has arrived, and the relieving driver and his firemen refuel their diesel locomotive through thick rubber hoses.

SPEAKER_18 34:28

We check to see that there's nothing dragging or hanging down, that all the wheels are okay, there's there's um nothing broken, and we've got plenty of fuel and water and oil. Ron, where do you take the train from here? We take it from here to Rolin at a distance of uh 303 miles, and it'll take us approximately uh about nine hours. Rollin' as well over the Western Australian border. Oh yes, quite a deal. It's a good uh 200 mile over the West Australian border.

SPEAKER_14 34:52

Do you ever see any unusual sites out here?

SPEAKER_18 34:55

Oh yes, we uh see what we consider to be unusual sites, you know. Occasional camel, uh we do see quite a bit of wildlife in the form of dingos and uh turkeys and uh thousands of rabbits and lots of foxes. But uh night time we see a few strange things like uh comets and uh falling meteorites and the things that people don't see in the city is because uh they're so hemmed in, whereas out here we've got the whole sky we can see from back to front.

SPEAKER_14 35:21

And it's also much clearer out here, I suppose. You don't have the same amount of clouds and you don't have any smoke over the city.

SPEAKER_18 35:27

No, nothing at all. The air's fresh and clean, and in fact uh these last few nights it's been uh shockingly cold. Temperature's been down to about 33 degrees, which is fairly cool.

SPEAKER_14 35:37

Then again in the summertime, I suppose it's just the opposite.

SPEAKER_18 35:39

Oh yes, it's uh stinking hot, really hot in the summertime. We uh I've seen it uh up around the 119, 121 in the cab. Back in the initial rim, it must be somewhere near 150. Everything's hot, everything you touch is hot and uh it's pretty uncomfortable. We lose a lot of sweat.

SPEAKER_14 36:02

The train is ready to leave for the West. Once again, Cook lies quiet. It's now late afternoon. School is out. Children play around the railway yards or sit under shady verandas doing their homework. In a house next door to the school, the schoolmaster and his wife relax with a cool drink.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

We have been here twelve months now.

SPEAKER_14 36:40

What did you think of the place? Had you heard anything about it before you came here?

SPEAKER_09 36:43

No, we'd only heard ghastly things, hadn't we?

SPEAKER_14 36:46

But you were still willing to come here. What had you heard about the place?

SPEAKER_09 36:49

Oh, that it was hot and barren and isolated and that sort of thing, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

What were your first impressions of Cook when you came off the train? Well, I thought, uh, e gad, this is far worse than I could have possibly expected. Uh but once again we adjusted to it, and after a few traumatic days, we've settled in. They say it's the nullabore plane, nullabore means no trees, and the very first impressions we had were just this. Since then we've found that this is not really true. There are trees around the place, but you have to go a jolly long way to find them.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

Well, don't you sit there, put on the bed.

SPEAKER_11 37:22

Come on. Otherwise, your dad will have a fit.

SPEAKER_14 37:27

I don't want you paying up tonight.

SPEAKER_02 37:29

Good night.

SPEAKER_14 37:31

On the front veranda of another cookhouse, railway fetler Fred Webb and his Aboriginal wife say goodnight to their children.

SPEAKER_02 37:41

Get your grapes, Beaver, and get to bed.

SPEAKER_14 37:44

With the children in bed, Fred Webb, with his rough, unshaven face and wearing a little red beanie, can lean back with a cold beer, relaxed in the cool evening air.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

Good, free, and easy life out of you. Nothing much to do over weekend, so you just wander out in the bush. Nobody to bother you. Have you always lived in the bush? All my life.

SPEAKER_14 38:06

Well, from your point of view, then it's it's just the thing for you, but there must be a lot of people that come from large cities, come out to make some money, but do find it very hard to settle in.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Oh, yeah, there's a heck of a lot of them. Matter of fact, we've got a few in the camp at the moment.

SPEAKER_11 38:20

A lot of the women, they uh like the younger ones, they get very depressed, you know. They end up getting on their nerve tablets or something. They s the biggest part of them come from the city. Well, they find it very hard to adjust to this kind of life. And they get depressed, and there's arguments, and the women want to go back, and then the men they want to stop out of you. Well, I was like that at first. Like coming from Adelaide out of you, I found it very hard.

SPEAKER_14 38:51

Not long after the sun has gone, the Indian Pacific passenger train pulls in at Cook. The silver carriages shine in the moonlight. While the engine drivers refuel the locomotive, the passengers take the opportunity to stretch their legs.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

I don't know, I feel real good in the train and all, and um, oh, I feel as if I could travel in the train for weeks on end and it wouldn't worry me.

SPEAKER_14 39:14

What do you like most about this kind of travel?

SPEAKER_00 39:16

Um, I suppose you feel at home and oh yeah, you meet plenty of people and I don't know, everything just seems to be so friendly, you know. It's real beautiful.

SPEAKER_14 39:41

The Indian Pacific leaves as the moon is rising high in the clear Nullabore sky. One or two goods trains will call later in the night, but there'll be no other activity around the tiny township of Cook until the sun rises in the morning. At seven o'clock in the morning, the gangs of fettlers head out from Cook along the railway line for the day's work. They ride in quad cars, which are tiny motorised buggies that rattle along the tracks. Twenty miles from Cook, the gang starts work. A section of the track is worn and must be taken up and replaced. Up they raise heavy sledgehammers, and down, down the hammers fall, ringing out a song of straining backs and sweating arms. And at the end of the day, back aboard the quad car and off into the shimmering distance towards Cook and a cool drink. It's Sunday morning and time for Sunday school. Classes are taken by the two sisters in charge of the small cook hospital.

SPEAKER_09 41:57

Well, we're missionaries here, and the main thing that we're here for is to well, two things. Firstly, to look after the sick people and their bodies, and secondly to tell them about Jesus, and uh I think this is probably the uh main reason why we came, knowing that nobody else was here, and that um if we didn't come nobody else would do this work.

SPEAKER_14 42:17

Where had you been working before this?

SPEAKER_09 42:19

I'd been working in Sydney.

SPEAKER_14 42:21

How about you?

SPEAKER_09 42:22

I've been working in Melbourne.

SPEAKER_14 42:23

So you're both very much used to the city way of life.

SPEAKER_09 42:26

Very much so, yes.

SPEAKER_14 42:27

What was it like when you first came out here?

SPEAKER_09 42:30

Very quiet. Um the isolation, more than anything else, I think, was what struck us and made us realise just how far out in the back blocks we were. But you become very used to it, and when I went back to the city on holidays, I I found myself almost screaming with the noise and and the traffic and and the rest of it.

SPEAKER_05 42:52

There we are. Yo, what's the coming track, please?

SPEAKER_14 42:57

The station master arrives for a meeting that's being held in an old weatherboard hall beside the railway track. There's no local council in Cook, as you'd find in a normal town, so it's the job of various railway staff members to help run the town. And the station master is in charge.

SPEAKER_16 43:15

Well, he uh is responsible for uh the property, the commissioner's property, which is the housing, the halls, the rest houses.

SPEAKER_14 43:33

The tea and sugar train arrives at Cook, and the whole town is out to greet it. But while there's a small store in town, the tea and sugar brings the weekly meat supply and also the men's pay.

SPEAKER_08 43:45

I think uh quite a lot of women find it rather unusual to have to clump up onto a train to buy the meat.

SPEAKER_14 43:52

And what about pay? I suppose as soon as that train gets in, that everyone in town rushes down there for their pay.

SPEAKER_16 43:57

My very word they do. They take a Great event. Uh I I think the world over, uh, men working, they look forward to that one day when they're going to reap the benefits of their labor and uh take home the pay packing, and we're certainly no exception at Cook.

SPEAKER_06 44:14

You want me with sweat and strain, but you're licking on right with pain.

SPEAKER_14 44:26

Late into the night, a fetler sings a lonely song to the stars.

SPEAKER_06 44:31

I'm tired of living, I'm skin.

SPEAKER_14 44:45

It can be a hard life, and it's a hot land. And some of the men occasionally drink more than they should. But woe betide the man in cook who causes any trouble, because the station master will lock him up in no time. Right here, in you go. In you get.

SPEAKER_17 45:02

Come on. We're cooling heels in here tonight.

SPEAKER_16 45:08

That's one jail I certainly wouldn't want to find myself locked in. No, it's it's not very well equipped, but it serves the purpose if ever we need to use it.

SPEAKER_14 45:17

I suppose this is uh a duty that uh not many station masters would have to perform in other places that are less isol isolated than Cook.

SPEAKER_16 45:25

No, well other other station masters at other locations have the uh advantage of having a uh uh a state police officer stationed at those particular stations. Uh here at Cook we don't have a police officer stationed here. Our nearest um arm of the law is at um Tarkula, 250 odd miles from here. If anyone gets out of line and it is necessary to uh restrain them, uh these cells are used and uh I'm the gentleman who's got to put them in.

SPEAKER_14 45:57

The station master at Cook is certainly no ordinary station master. He's the town's chief official, and if you've got any problems at all, he's the man to see. He's the man who wears many caps, the station master on the lonely Nullabor.

SPEAKER_15 46:11

Well, gentlemen, your train will be arriving at uh quarter to uh two.

Avoiding deadly potholes: The Nullarbor Piggyback

SPEAKER_12 46:27

An absolutely fascinating aspect of the Transcontinental Railway, along with the tea and sugar train, was the Nullabor piggyback. Even when I was going across the Nullabor from 1969 to 1971, close to 400 kilometres of the road across the Nullabor was still unsealed, so unless you drove with great caution, it was treacherous. The bulldust that rose in great red plumes was great for signalling that a vehicle was approaching kilometres and kilometres away in the distance, but it also hid under your wheels deep potholes that were more like craters. Bad for ordinary vehicles, but a nightmare for truck drivers. Hence the Nullabor piggyback. Whole trucks and their loads would be driven onto railway flat cars at either end of the Nullabor stretch of the Transcontinental, so in Port Augusta in South Australia or Calgooley in the west. The trucks would be lashed down securely. Then the truckies would make themselves at home in an old carriage at the back of the train. And I do mean make themselves at home. Out would come the sausages, the eggs, whatever they wanted to cook, and maybe a beer or two. And for the next twenty or so hours they'd relax, playing cards, swap stories, or just spine bash. What a life.

SPEAKER_04 47:56

How about this? Now we're gonna have that gym.

SPEAKER_12 48:02

When the next season of the Red Dust Tapes podcast begins, I'll bring you the Nullabor Piggyback story. As part of my hitching rides with truckies over thousands of kilometres of Highway No. Unsealed, dusty, muddy, and rough as hell. Meanwhile, thanks to folklorist Warren Fay for his songs, and just as it was with her Aboriginal Stockman story in our earlier chapter on drovers, it was a pleasure to bring you a little from the book by Patsy Adams Smith, Folklore of the Australian Railway Men, unfortunately now out of print. Now, don't forget, make sure you check out my website, reddust tapes.au. This is John Francis, and Red Dust Tapes saying, hoo roo for now.