The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall Read online

  Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

  The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

  A writer with an ear for the rhythms of Australian speech, Melbourne-based Alan Marshall published in the dominant social realist tradition of the 1940s and ‘50s. The author of short stories, journalism, children’s books, novels and advice columns, he is best remembered for the first book of his autobiography, I Can Jump Puddles (1955). His work is marked by a deep interest in rural and working-class life, with an emphasis on shared experience.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  ALAN

  MARSHALL

  The Complete Stories

  of Alan Marshall

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Nelson publishers, Australia in 1977

  Copyright © Alan Marshall 1977

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

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  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from

  the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 538 5 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74343 267 9 (ebook)

  Contents

  Introduction Stephen Murray-Smith

  TELL US ABOUT THE TURKEY, JO

  Tell Us About the Turkey, Jo

  Bulls

  The Grey Kangaroo

  A Little Son

  Cardiac

  Little Girl

  The Singing of the Sun

  You’re a Character

  First Kill

  Tch! Tch!

  An Encounter

  Crossing the Road

  Bushman

  Blow Carson, I Say

  Mary, Do You Know What?

  The Dog

  The Gentleman

  Prelude to Foreclosure

  Clarkey’s Dead

  Beware of the Man in the Blue Suit

  Stepmother

  Grey Morning

  Kiss Her?—I’d Kiss Her!

  No Murderin’ from Now On, Eh?

  Boot Factory

  THESE ARE MY PEOPLE

  The Aborigines’ Grave

  PEOPLE OF THE DREAMTIME

  The Dog and the Kangaroo

  The Eaglehawk and the Crow

  The Winjarning Brothers

  HOW’S ANDY GOING?

  They were Tough Men on the Speewah

  Blue Stews

  How’s Andy Going?

  Street Scene at Midday

  My Bird

  See the White Feathers Fall

  Out of the Way, Mug

  Trees Can Speak

  Wild Red Horses

  It’s a Hen’s Track

  How My Friends Keep Me Going

  Tips for Birthdays

  The Donkey

  Along the Track

  SHORT STORIES

  The Three-legged Bitch

  Mrs Hookey’s Dick

  How I Met General Pau

  Hairy Legs

  Four Sunday Suits

  Singing to God

  FESTIVAL AND OTHER STORIES

  When a Man Kills, He Runs

  HAMMERS OVER THE ANVIL

  ‘Duke’ McLeod

  Mick Hanrahan

  Peter McLeod

  Jimmy Virtue

  Elsie

  East Driscoll

  Joe’s Home

  Old Mrs Bilson

  Miss Armitage

  Pat Corrigan

  Mr Thomas

  The Ostrich Man

  Miss Trengrove

  Fear

  Judy Fliesher

  Snarly Burns

  Freckles Jack

  Miss McAlister

  Miss Barlow

  Miss McPherson

  The Catholic Ball

  Acknowledgements

  The publisher wishes to acknowledge the following publications in which Alan Marshall’s short stories appeared: the ABC Weekly, Australia, Australian New Writing, Bohemia, the Bulletin, the Labor Call, the Left Review, Meanjin, the Melbourne Herald, Overland, Pertinent, Smith’s Weekly and the Sun News-Pictorial. In addition, specific acknowledgement is due to the publishers of the following collections: Festival and Other Stories (Wren, Melbourne, 1975), Hammers over the Anvil (Nelson, Melbourne, 1975), How’s Andy Going? (Cheshire, Melbourne, 1956), Short Stories (Nelson, Melbourne, 1973), and Tell us about the Turkey, Jo (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1946).

  Special acknowledgement is made to Noel Counihan for his pen drawings; to Mr and Mrs B. Hadlow for their permission to use the Noel Counihan portrait on the cover; and to Peter Wells, who photographed the portrait.

  It should be noted that some previously published short stories by Alan Marshall were not included in this anthology, at the author’s request.

  Introduction

  We live in times which are not very loving. No politician is loved as Ben Chifley was loved, or even Maurice Blackburn. As an academic I must say that I know of no vice-chancellor today, anywhere in this country, who is as loved or as lovable as Raymond Priestley or John Medley, sometime of the University of Melbourne. None of us love our teachers much these days: there is a kind of critical disaffection abroad, and not only in the schools, of a ‘times are out joint’ kind, which has eroded affection from the market-place. No poet is loved as Lawson was loved; we may admire Fred Williams or Clif Pugh or Arthur Boyd, but unless we know them well on personal terms their work does not arouse a personal empathy between the viewer and the artist. Art has moved towards distancing itself from the consumer. Gladys Moncrieff, Roy Rene, Les Darcy, you are needed at this hour.

  Among Australian authors there has been, in recent times, one interesting exception. Alan Marshall not only held a firm place in the thoughts of all who knew him—and it was never hard to get to know Alan, as he must sometimes have ruefully reflected—but was a man who was regarded with national affection.

  This was partly because his art was never pretentious. He never tried to be trendy; on the other hand he was never self-consciously folksy, either. Of course he was punished for this, as Lawson was too, for two generations. It is only recently that the critics have been looking closely at Alan’s prose, and starting to recognise within it the superb literary and intellectual skills, the quality of thought, of which it is compounded. I will be very surprised if Alan Marshall’s creative reputation does not bloom very considerably over the next fi
fty years as his deceptively concealed powers become more accessible to investigation.

  One of the reasons why we have accepted Alan’s art, rather than studied it and talked about it, is because of his immense skill in drawing us into his own world and making us feel, if not exactly part of it, then deeply engaged with it. I once had a letter from London, from a young architect, in which he talked about the poetry in a recent Overland as being symptomatic of ‘something a tiny bit intellectual, simplifying therefore distant’, but then goes on to talk about how Alan’s studies of the people of his childhood in the same issue (and now published in this book) exemplify what is needed instead: ‘compassion linked to a deepening comprehension of perceptions’.

  I think this quality in Alan Marshall came through most clearly in his morning radio readings of material from his own books. Each one of these short readings was an artistic act of great power, linking the voice and personality of the creator with the words that evoke other times, places, characters, incidents. I don’t remember much these days of what I see or hear or read, and on the face of it I suppose the least likely setting to remember things is in driving to work over thirty miles of busy road. Yet the wonder of what Alan was doing in these broadcasts stays vividly with me: the child at the piestand, or the hobo looking for his mate and fearful he has fallen under the train. A marvellous and moving experience, in the fullest sense of the phrase an artistic experience, and I hope that for the sake of the future the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has kept the tapes.

  In these broadcasts we had a combination of qualities: Alan Marshall as narrator, as writer, as man. I realised more fully than ever before that we had a person here of quite exceptional importance to us all, a creator who, in our fractioned world, impels us towards a unity of the spirit. It is true that in this book we lack the voice of the narrator: the dry, warm, Australian voice of Alan’s—the laconic evenness of the bushman rather than the polished cadences of the actor. But per contra we have the pleasure of being able to linger over the words and phrasing and of being able to return to the edge of the pool.

  Alan seemed to me one of the most ‘whole’ men I am ever likely to meet. Like a benign priest, humanity could not shock him. More than this, I felt on talking to him that he asked more questions of himself about himself than the rest of us can dream of doing. This gave his writing, even the most dramatic of it, a sense of peace and unity, and I believe that with Marshall it is here that we must look for the core of that quality that all great writers have, the capacity to unsettle the reader. In other words, Marshall is hitting hard at the most exposed flank in our national psyche. Of course he can and should be read for simple pleasure, but whether he knew it or not he was in fact opening more doors than that.

  Alan Marshall is no longer with us and, in death, he is probably all-forgetting. But, as Samuel Butler has reminded us, men like him will not be all-forgotten. Many who are not yet even a twinkle in their great-grandfather’s eyes will draw knowledge and beauty from Alan Marshall, and will still be his people.

  Stephen Murray-Smith

  Tell Us About the Turkey, Jo

  Tell Us About the Turkey, Jo

  He came walking through the rusty grasses and sea-weedish plants that fringe Lake Corangamite. Behind him strode his brother.

  He was very fair. His hair was a pale gold and when he scratched his head the parted hairs revealed the pink skin of his scalp. His eyes were very blue. He was freckled. His nose was tipped upward. I liked him tremendously. I judged him to be about four and a half years old and his brother twice that age.

  They wore blue overalls and carried them jauntily. The clean wind came across the water and fluttered the material against their legs. Their air was one of independence and release from authority.

  They scared the two plovers I had been watching. The birds lifted with startled cries and banked against the wind. They cut across large clouds patched with blue and sped away, flapping low over the water.

  The two boys and I exchanged greetings while we looked each other over. I think they liked me. The little one asked me several personal questions. He wanted to know what I was doing there, why I was wearing a green shirt, where was my mother? I gave him the information with the respect due to another seeker of knowledge. I then asked him a question and thus learned of the dangers and disasters that had beset his path.

  ‘How did you get that cut on your head?’ I asked. In the centre of his forehead a pink scar divided his freckles.

  The little boy looked quickly at his brother. The brother answered for him. The little boy expected and conceded this. He looked at the brother expectantly and, as the brother spoke, the little boy’s eyes shone, his lips parted, as one who listens to a thrilling story.

  ‘He fell off a baby’s chair when he was little,’ said the brother. ‘He hit his head on a shovel and bled over it.’

  ‘Ye-e-s,’ faltered the little boy, awed by the picture, and in his eyes was excitement and the thrill of danger passed. He looked across the flat water, rapt in the thought of the chair and the shovel and the blood.

  ‘A cow kicked him once,’ said the brother.

  ‘A cow!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Go on, Jo,’ said the little boy eagerly, standing before him and looking up into his face.

  ‘He tried to leg-rope it,’ Jo explained, ‘and the cow let out and got him in the stomach.’

  ‘In the stomach,’ emphasised the little boy turning quickly to me and nodding his head.

  ‘Gee!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Gee!’ echoed the little boy.

  ‘It winded him,’ said Jo.

  ‘I was winded,’ said the little boy slowly as if in doubt. ‘What’s winded, Jo?’

  ‘He couldn’t breathe properly,’ Jo addressed me.

  ‘I couldn’t breathe a bit,’ said the little boy.

  ‘That was bad,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it was bad, wasn’t it, Jo?’ said the little boy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jo.

  Jo looked intently at the little boy as if searching for scars of other conflicts.

  ‘A ladder fell on him once,’ he said.

  The little boy looked quickly at my face to see if I was impressed. The statement had impressed him very much.

  ‘No,’ said I unbelievingly.

  ‘Will I show him, Jo?’ asked the little boy eagerly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jo.

  The little boy, after giving me a quick glance of satisfaction, bent and placed his hands on his knees. Jo lifted the back of his brother’s shirt collar and peered into the warm shadow between his back and the cotton material.

  ‘You can see it,’ he said uncertainly, searching the white skin for its whereabouts.

  The little boy twisted his arm behind his back and strove to touch a spot on one of his shoulders.

  ‘It’s there, Jo. Can you see it, Jo?’

  ‘Yes. That’s it,’ said Jo. ‘You come here and see.’ He looked at me. ‘Don’t move, Jimmy.’

  ‘Jo’s found it,’ announced Jimmy, his head twisted to face me.

  I rose from my seat on a pitted rock nestling in grass and stepped over to them. I bent and looked beneath the lifted collar. On the white skin of his shoulder was the smooth ridge of a small scar.

  ‘Yes. It’s there all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll bet you cried when you got that.’

  The little boy turned to Jo. ‘Did I cry, Jo?’

  ‘A bit,’ said Jo.

  ‘I never do cry much, do I, Jo?’

  ‘No,’ said Jo.

  ‘How did it happen?’ I asked.

  ‘The ladder had hooks in it . . .’ commenced Jo.

  ‘Had hooks in it,’ emphasised the little boy nodding at me.

  ‘And he pulled it down on top of him,’ continued Jo.

  ‘Oo!’ said the little boy excitedly, clasping his hands and holding them between his knees while he stamped his feet. ‘Oo-o-o.’

  ‘It knocked him ro
tten,’ said Jo.

  ‘I was knocked rotten,’ declared the little boy slowly as if revealing the fact to himself for the first time.

  There was a pause while the little boy enjoyed his thoughts.

  ‘It’s a nice day, isn’t it?’ Jo sought new contacts with me.

  ‘Yes,’ said I.

  The little boy stood in front of his brother, entreating him with his eyes.

  ‘What else was I in, Jo?’ he pleaded.

  Jo pondered, looking at the ground and nibbling his thumb.

  ‘You was in nothin’ else,’ he said, finally.

  ‘Aw, Jo!’ The little boy was distressed at the finality of the statement. He bent suddenly and pulled up the leg of his overalls. He searched his bare leg for marks of violence.

  ‘What’s that, Jo?’ He pointed to a faint mark on his knee.

  ‘That’s nothin’,’ said Jo. Jo wanted to talk about ferrets. ‘You know, ferrets . . .’ he began.

  ‘It looks like something,’ I said, looking closely at the mark.

  Jo leant forward and examined it. The little boy, clutching the crumpled leg of his trousers, looked from my face to his brother’s and back again, anxiously waiting a decision.

  Jo made a closer examination, rubbing the mark with his finger. The little boy followed Jo’s investigation with an expectant attention.

  ‘You mighta had a burn once. I don’t know.’

  ‘I wish I did have a burn, Jo,’ said the little boy. It was a plea for a commitment from Jo, but Jo was a stickler for truth.

  ‘I can’t remember you being burnt,’ he said. ‘Mum’d know.’

  ‘Perhaps you can think of another exciting thing,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ said the little boy eagerly. He came over and took my hand so that we might await together the result of Jo’s cogitation. He looked up at me and said, ‘Isn’t Jo good?’

  ‘Very good,’ I said.

  ‘He knows about me and everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  There was a faint ‘Hulloo’ from behind us. We all turned. A little girl came running through the rocks in the barrier that guards the lake from the cultivated lands. She had thin legs and wore long, black stockings. One had come loose from its garter and, as she ran, she bent and pulled and strove to push its top beneath the elastic band. Her gait was thus a series of hops and unequal strides.