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  Whispering in the Wind: Text Classics - About the Book

  Once upon a time, long long ago, beyond the Tin Shed, and the other side of the Black Stump, there lived an old man and a little boy. The old man’s name was Crooked Mick and the boy’s name was Peter. The bush grew so thickly around their hut there was no room for a dog to wag its tail amongst the trees and barking was impossible.

  Alan Marshall’s enchanting bush fairy tale is the story of Peter’s quest to rescue a beautiful princess, if only he knew where to find one. Whispering in the Wind teems with eccentric characters, heroic deeds and witty riddles, not to mention a witch who sweeps the moon at night, a kangaroo with a bottomless pouch and a dragon that turns out to be a bunyip.

  ‘A giant in Australian children’s literature.’ Paul Jennings

  The visionary Diana Gribble founded Text in 1990. She wanted to create an independent publishing house that would find books to enlighten, challenge and entertain us. In keeping with this vision, Text Classics are books by our most loved writers who tell our stories.

  textclassics.com.au

  Text Classics

  ALAN MARSHALL was born in 1902 in the small town of Noorat in the Western District of Victoria. He is most famous for his fictionalised autobiography, I Can Jump Puddles, published in 1955, which tells the story of his childhood. At the age of six he contracted poliomyelitis, and the disease left him permanently physically disabled. Though he relied on crutches to get about, he was determined to take part in all the usual activities of a country kid. And in later life he wrote to hundreds of disabled children, encouraging them to follow their dreams.

  When Alan was a teenager, he moved with his family to Melbourne, where he became an accountant and worked in the office of a shoe factory. When the factory closed down in 1935 he started writing full time. He wrote articles about the economic hardships faced by the people in Melbourne for several publications including the Communist Review and Workers’ Voice, and edited an anti-fascist magazine called Point. When the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was set up in 1949, Alan Marshall was among the first people it kept files on.

  In 1941 he married Olive Dulcie Dixon, and the couple had two children.

  Alan Marshall won three Australian Literary Society short story awards, and in 1944 he published the first of his fifteen books, a collection of stories called These Are My People. Whispering in the Wind was published in 1969.

  Marshall was awarded an OBE in 1972 for services to the disabled, and an Order of Australia in 1981 for services to literature. He died in 1984.

  SHANE MALONEY is the author of the award-winning and much-loved Murray Whelan series—Stiff, The Brush-Off, Nice Try, The Big Ask, Something Fishy and Sucked In. He has been published in the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Finland and the US.

  JACK NEWNHAM is a Melbourne illustrator. His drawings appeared in the first edition of Whispering in the Wind.

  BOOKS BY ALAN MARSHALL

  These Are My People

  Tell Us about the Turkey, Jo

  Ourselves Writ Strange

  How Beautiful Are Thy Feet

  Pull Down the Blind

  I Can Jump Puddles

  This Is the Grass

  In Mine Own Heart

  Whispering in the Wind

  Aboriginal Myths, with Sreten Bozic

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  About Alan Marshall

  About Shane Maloney

  Also by Alan Marshall

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  Great Galloping Bush Whiskers

  by Shane Maloney

  Whispering in the Wind

  Dedication

  1 The Beginning of the Quest

  2 Peter Meets Greyfur

  3 The Land of Clutching Grass

  4 Greyfur Fights the Giant

  5 The Storm in the Giant’s Castle

  6 Peter and Greyfur are Captured by the Pale Witch

  7 Peter and the Witch Fly to the Moon

  8 The Willy Willy Man

  9 The Fight with the Doubt Cats

  10 They Meet the Bunyip

  11 The Bunyip’s Story

  12 Greyfur’s Fight with the Bunyip

  13 Inside the Castle Gates

  14 The Beautiful Princess

  15 The Three Tasks

  16 The Lying Competition

  17 The Return of the Willy Willy Man

  18 Firefax

  19 The Return to the Castle

  20 The Last Task

  21 Peter Marries the Beautiful Princess

  Text Classics

  Copyright page

  Great Galloping Bush Whiskers

  by Shane Maloney

  Imagine that you are a six-year-old child. One day, you get a sore throat and a headache and start to feel generally icky. Your parents put you to bed. You don’t get better. Within a few days, you cannot move your legs and your back has begun to curve. You have caught an infectious disease known as poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis. It is a virus that attacks mainly children. There is no known cure. You might die. If you survive, you will spend the rest of your life as a cripple, able to walk only with your legs strapped into contraptions of steel and leather. You will be the child, the one that every primary school has, who clumps around in calipers, unable to run and skip and join in the other children’s games. Worst of all, you will become an object of pity.

  Until the development of a vaccine in the 1950s, epidemics of polio periodically swept through Australia, striking down tens of thousands of children. Alan Marshall was one of them. By the time I Can Jump Puddles, the first volume of his autobiography, was published in 1955, he had been living with its effects for more than forty years. His vivid and lively memoir of his boyhood affliction and his indomitable spirit in overcoming its limitations became a beloved classic and remains the work for which he is best known. Millions of copies were sold worldwide, proving particularly popular in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe. An award-winning film adaptation was made in Czechoslovakia in 1970 and it was produced as a television series here in Australia in 1981.

  Alan Marshall enjoyed a long and prolific writing career, beginning in the 1930s and running until his death in 1984. The son of a horse-breaker, he began to write short stories while working as an accountant in a shoe factory in Collingwood during the Depression of the early 1930s. After the factory shut down, he contributed to magazines and newspapers, including a lonely-hearts column for Woman that ran for almost twenty years. His personal experience and his observation of ordinary people dealing with an unfair and oppressive social system led him to join the anti-fascist Writers’ League. During World War II, he travelled around Australia in a horse-drawn caravan, gathering messages from soldiers’ families for the A.I.F. News, a weekly paper for the troops in North Africa. Entranced by the outback and its colourful characters, he spent time in Arnhem Land living among Aboriginal people and writing a number of books about his experiences.

  ‘Underlying all of Marshall’s writing is a simple code,’ according to the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, ‘grounded in an optimistic faith in humanity, that values social solidarity, tenacity, work and physical courage.’

  In 1969 he published Whispering in the Wind, his first children’s book. Despite some good reviews, it failed to find a readership and eventually went out of print. A reminder of a time when the crows flew backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes and the bandicoots were bigger than bullocks, it now presents itself to new generations of readers.

  Like any self-respecting once-upon-a-time story, this one takes place in a world that is both strange and familiar, where the commonplace
becomes magical and the most remarkable things are normal. Our hero, Peter, is a young boy who dwells in a snug little bark hut deep in the bush with Crooked Mick, an old bushman and the greatest buckjump rider in all the world.

  ‘Crooked Mick of the Speewah’ was a long-established mythical figure, a product of the oral tradition of the droving campfire and the shearing shed, a giant of a man who would eat two sheep for lunch and could split a fence post just by staring at it. To Marshall’s contemporaneous readers, the presence of Crooked Mick was an unmistakable signal that Whispering in the Wind was a species of bush yarn, a tall tale whose whole point lay in the inventiveness of its telling.

  ‘If ever you come across anyone who claims to have met Crooked Mick,’ warned folklore collector Bill Wannan, ‘listen to them with deep respect, for they will be a prodigious liar.’ Marshall had written the foreword to Wannan’s definitive The Australian: Yarns, Ballads, Legends, Traditions of the Australian People (1954), and it is difficult not to detect an element of chiacking in his depiction of Peter’s father figure.

  The little bark hut of Peter’s idyllic bush existence contains only two books, one about horses and the other about princesses. It can hardly be surprising then that Peter nurses an ambition to ride forth and rescue a beautiful princess from a dragon. According to the South Wind, a beardy old bloke who gets around a fair bit, only one such creature exists in Australia. The prisoner of a nasty king, she is guarded by a fierce bunyip.

  And so begins Peter’s quest. Mounted on his pony, Moonlight, his tucker bag stuffed with chops and sausages, Thunderbolt the magic stockwhip in hand, he sets forth on his rescue mission. In short order, he enlists a trusty offsider in the form of Greyfur the Kangaroo, who has the handy ability to pull anything from an elephant to a grand piano out of her pouch depending on the needs of the situation.

  Onward they press, through the Whispering Grass, confronting the Jarrah Giant, the Doubt Cats and various other Creatures with Names in Capital Letters. A standout among the talking flora and fauna is the Pale Witch who, along with her broomstick and cauldron, possesses an avid interest in photography. On her nocturnal visits to sweep the moon, she pinches the cameras the Americans have left behind on their space missions, littering up the place. Even in the back of beyond, news has arrived of the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon. (Marshall sent a copy of the book to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the moon in the year Whispering in the Wind was published.)

  With many such winks and sly digs, the yarn gets shaggier and shaggier. But in due course, all obstacles are overcome, the hairy Bunyip is bested and the hand of the Beautiful Princess Lowana is won. It’s grilled sausages all round and everybody ends up jolly good friends.

  It cannot be denied that some elements of Whispering in the Wind have not travelled well through the Shifting Sands of Time. Notwithstanding the author’s progressive credentials, the enchanted Australia he conjures is a male one, and white. Aboriginal people have been erased from its sweeping horizons. They live elsewhere, sidelined and compartmentalised in a ‘land of the Aborigines’ and exist solely to supply a sonorous dash of Dreamtime wisdom to get Peter’s hero-quest up and running. The fact that the Princess bears ‘an Aboriginal name’ merely serves to emphasise Indigenous absence.

  And frankly, there’s not much in it for the Princess, either. Her large and comfy room is lined with artworks and bookshelves. She has wall-to-wall Persian carpet and several pet rabbits. By the time Peter climbs through her window, she’s read the Chronicles of Narnia and all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings.

  It’s hard to imagine such a girl would find much enduring attraction happily-ever-after cooking and tidying a slab hut in the middle of nowhere, even if the gig includes a lot of galloping around on a white horse with her long hair blowing behind her like a stream of gold. Apart from anything else, it would be a waste of her Matriculation.

  But Whispering in the Wind never pretends to be anything but a tall tale, told with tongue firmly in cheek and with a young readership in mind. Never a political polemicist, Marshall had long refused to conform to the view held by many of his comrades of the left that art should be didactic, and I fancy that some elements of the book first took root in the mind of a small boy in the backblocks of rural Victoria, bedridden and paralysed, his imagination racing ahead of his crippled body.

  When the creator of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, was quizzed about the patent on his discovery, he said that like the sun, vaccines belong to the people. It was a sentiment with which Alan Marshall doubtless concurred. And if this new edition of Whispering in the Wind raises questions about race and gender and matters of national identity, I don’t doubt he’d agree that was a good thing, too.

  To Anne Bechervaise

  the beautiful princess

  1

  The Beginning of the Quest

  Once upon a time, long long ago, beyond the Tin Shed, and the other side of the Black Stump, there lived an old man and a little boy. The old man’s name was Crooked Mick and the little boy’s name was Peter.

  They lived in a bark hut with two windows and a chimney. The bush grew so thickly around their hut there was no room for a dog to wag its tail amongst the trees and barking was impossible.

  Inside the hut were two chairs, a table and two beds. There was an open fireplace with a blackened billy hanging from a chain above the coals. Bridles and saddles hung from pegs on the wall. Above the fireplace was a picture of a bucking horse, and the man on its back was Crooked Mick. On a shelf were two books, one about horses and the other about Beautiful Princesses. Possums lived in the rafters above the beds and bandicoots lived in burrows under the floor.

  Crooked Mick was the greatest rider in all the world. He could stand on a horse while it bucked, and he could lie on a horse while it bucked, and he could sit on a horse and drink two cups of tea while it bucked. He had ridden horses that bucked so high he could scoop in the stars with his hat and he had ridden horses that bucked so fast they bucked off their brands. He had ridden white horses and black horses and piebald horses, but never in all his life had he been thrown. Crooked Mick had taught Peter to ride.

  Peter had a white pony that could gallop faster than the wind. It was more beautiful than a bird and seemed to have wings on its hooves. When great thunderstorms came tramping through the bush and hurtling clouds clashed above the clearings with swords of lightning, Peter galloped through the storm leaping each flash before it disappeared. The white pony tossed its head and neighed to the wind. Its long tail and mane blew like banners, and it carried Peter through the swift rain so fast no drops fell upon him. Its hooves fell so lightly upon the earth that the flowers of the bush remained erect when they had passed and the raindrops gathered by the grass still beaded each stem.

  Once the South Wind shouted, ‘Hey, Boy on the White Pony that leaps the lightning, pull up! I want to speak to you.’ His voice was like thunder and he gathered his cloak of cloud around him as he stepped out of the storm and sat on a log. He was an old man with a long, white beard glittering with raindrops, but his eyes were bright like a child’s.

  Peter reined in his pony in front of the South Wind and it reared and pranced and arched its neck and tossed its head. It was a child of wind and sun and wanted to follow the storm over the mountains where there were wide plains across which to gallop. But Peter patted its neck and said, ‘Steady boy!’ and it stood still.

  ‘How wonderfully you ride!’ said the South Wind. ‘How wonderfully your pony leaps the clouds! What is its name?’

  ‘Moonlight.’

  ‘Moonlight!’ repeated the South Wind. ‘I like that name. It is a fitting name for a pony whose coat is as bright as the moon. I wonder, would you both work for me? You see, I wash the earth and keep it clean. I blow away the dead leaves and drench the earth with rain. If you come with me what a magnificent life you will lead. You will meet my brothers, the North Wind, the West Wind and the East Wind, and you can help us in our forays round the world.
You will be able to gallop ahead and lead us over mountains and across plains. We will tether the clouds to your saddle and you can tow them to the Mulga Plains and to the Land of Spinifex beyond the Coastal Mountains. You would bring rain to the desert where the whirlwinds live and they would become bright with flowers.’

  ‘Would I find a Beautiful Princess in the places you visit?’ Peter asked him.

  ‘A Beautiful Princess!’ exclaimed the South Wind, and his laughter shook the trees. ‘No, no! Why I haven’t seen a Beautiful Princess for a thousand years. I used to see them braiding their golden hair while they looked out of castle windows. But now…No, you wouldn’t find a Beautiful Princess in the lands I visit. Why do you wish to find a Beautiful Princess?’

  ‘I want to rescue her.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From a Dragon.’

  ‘Well now, that’s going to be most difficult. Dragons! Now let me think. When did I last see a Dragon! Probably China. I forget. Beautiful Princesses guarded by Dragons…Now, that is a problem.’

  ‘Crooked Mick told me that if I searched long enough I would find a Beautiful Princess. He told me all the Beautiful Princesses he had met were guarded by Dragons.’

  ‘Crooked Mick!’ exclaimed the South Wind. ‘Isn’t he the man who wrestled with a Whirlwind and broke its back?’

  ‘Yes, he did. He told me.’

  ‘I know him,’ said the South Wind. ‘I once carried him fifty miles on a sheet of galvanised iron.’

  ‘He was mending the shearing shed roof when you blew him away,’ said Peter. ‘He told me he travelled the fifty miles in ten minutes.’

  ‘Ah, that was a storm!’ exclaimed the South Wind, rubbing his hands together with pleasure at the memory. ‘He had chained his bullock wagon to a red gum tree and I made it flap like a sheet. If he says you will find a Beautiful Princess, there must be one in Australia. Wait here a moment while I travel over the land from North to South and from East to West, and I will come back and tell you where I have found her.’