Illywhacker

By November 1934 I was a different man. I could read without moving my lips. I was an old python with his opaque skin now shed, his blindness gone, once again splendid and supple, seeing the world in all its terrifying colours. I had been drip-fed on Rosa's letters and Leah's monologues. I read the newspapers with the sensitivity of one liar regarding the work of another. An unemployed boilermaker from Williamstown, picked up on the road, was not just a witty fellow with a runny nose and a knowledge of horses, he was a symbol of the injustices that threaded all the way from the railway police who had most recently bashed him to Adolf Hitler and Mussolini.

People were still starving in Australia although the newspapers now denied it. When the Australian car industry at last capitulated and General Motors began manufacturing the press trumpeted the triumph.

I had become an armchair expert, busting for a fight.

I built my huts wherever we stayed, and left them for others to shelter in. This pitiful charity was hardly satisfying to a man like me. And yet I could think of nothing better. I slandered the communists for mindlessness and the Labour Party for racism. And at the same time I envied Izzie whose letters rubbed at me, irritated me, judged me, were sand between the skins of Badgery amp; Goldstein.

And it was in this mood that I took on the railway police.

I would not have minded the railway police if they were weak or unprincipled men trying to survive. Christ knows I have been both, am both, will always be both. But the railway police did not have the grace to lower their eyes in the face of decency, acquitted themselves like bully boys, enjoying the thwack of their three-foot batons. They evicted human beings from carriages carpeted with sheep shit and thought themselves righteous for doing it.

The battle was not planned in advance and started quite by chance. We were carrying a swag of rosellas down to Melbourne and stopped, somewhere between Maldon and Ben-digo, to inquire directions from a group of bagmen who were milling around the railway line. They were trying to get up to Shepparton to pick fruit. Fifty yards up the line I could see the cause of the blockage – there were half a dozen railway police leaning against a siding platform. They leant like men in a bar, sticking out their potato bellies.

There was a communist amongst the bagmen. He had got up a deputation and had conferences, but with no useful result -the Johns had sworn to massacre the swaggies if they jumped the rattler. The men were now in disarray, some for fighting, some for staying, some for walking into Maldon to get the dole there.

What I did was not done like a nice man. It was done with spit on my shoe, swagger in my walk, a nasty glint in my eye, a charming smile on my face. As I walked up that railway track to talk to the bully boys I was my father's son. I had a vision of myself that sunny morning as I had not had a vision of myself for years: I couldsee Herbert Badgery again. I was delighted to hear the crunch of railway gravel. I was pleased my shoes were spit-bright, my handsome head newly shaved. I adopted the bearing of a brigadier and swung the silver-topped cane I used in my act as an idiot. I could feel Leah's eyes (wet, bright, big) boring into my broad straight back, but I was not doing this for her admiration. I was doing it for my own.

I tipped my Akubra to the gentlemen in blue who hung around the siding drinking tea from their thermos. They had, of course, observed me speaking with their enemies, but they had also witnessed my walk towards them (need I stress, again, the importance of the correct approach to walking?). They were uncertain as to how to take me. Perhaps they brought me an inspector in disguise and they offered me tea and gave up the rest of their soiled lumpy sugar when I demanded it.

I was, by then, an accomplished Thespian; I understood the value of silence on a stage, how it can be used to induce suspense, and then hysteria. I used a long cloak of silence to examine them. The smallest one was the most dangerous. He was none other than John Oliver O'Dowd, the same who was later responsible for Izzie's misfortune at Albury, a bully of a rare and dedicated sort, short, broad-shouldered, small-eyed, a type often mistaken for homosexual by people trying to explain the odd seepings of sentimentality in that otherwise impassive, excessively masculine face.