Jack Johnson is the author of When The Clock Strikes, a fascinating account of growing up in Dandenong, his years tending to the city’s pipes and drains as a plumber and bringing up a family with wife Frances in their beloved home in Macpherson Street.
WHEN I was a boy nature strips were untended and householders put their beer bottles out on the long grass.
The bottles couldn’t be seen from the road and they knew we would collect them.
It also saved them embarrassment and the scorn of the temperance movement by not having to have the bottle-O call to collect them with his horse and wagon.
My brother Nipper and I would go along McCrae and Langhorne streets with a gunny sack and collect the bottles.
We lugged them down to Old Bill the Bottle-Os in McCrae Street that was behind a picket fence. The bottle-O bagged beer bottles in old wheat, bran or spud bags and stored them in his yard and sheds until the berwery or bottle makers called to pick them up.
Saturday mornings were always busy for him as many workers and farmers came to the Saturday morning produce market and brought bottles to his yard.
If the large beer bottles were in good condition we got a ha’penny each for them and at that time that was the only sized beer bottle made.
I did say Old Bill, but when we were kids we were never disrespectful of age.
To us kids, anyone over 30 or 40 was old.
In those days many of the businessnesses were run by a father and son, so even our parents referred to the senior person as Old Mister Bailey, or Old Connaughton or Old Maggs.
In the bottle-Os case ’old’ was a term of respect, even though, in great anger one day, Old Bill just missed leaving the imprint of his hobnail book on Nipper’s small arse after a failed bottle deal.
We had done our usual trek around the nature strips of town and had not found one bottle; not even a plonk bottle, which was worth nothing.
Being the small wheeler-dealer that he was, Nipper’s tiny mind was churning over ideas to get a few pennies now that the beer bottle production of the the nature strips had, like the grass, dried up.
Suddenly it came to him. Nipper shot off under the McCrae Street bridge to the back of the bottle-O’s yard.
He picked up four of the least chipped and cracked bottles from the heap at the back of the yard.
He shoved three into the gunny sack I was carrying and taking the one with the least number of chips, cleaned it as best he could by rubbing it on the gunny sack.
He then headed back to the front gate of the bottle-O yard, trying hard to look as if we had just come down McCrae Street.
Old Bill was studying the racing form.
Without taking his eyes off the racing guide he yelled loudly: “Go to the shithouse! They’re broken“.
That made me think he had been watching us since we first went up the drain.
To my amazement Nipper started another sales pitch.
Holding the chipped bottle up towards this fuming person he casually said: “But they are only chipped at the top. So you could cut the top off them.“
With this Old Bill yelled: “Now I am really going to kick your arse“ and leapt from the doorway.
Old Bill’s large boot missed the threadbare seat of Nipper’s pants by a mere half inch.
We raced on past Kingsbury’s and Keatings’ houses and shot in behind the large cypress hedge of Smitty’s house, the home of another of Nipper’s mates.
As we caught our breath, incredibly the small wheeler dealer was already working out another way to get a few pennies.
“Well, we can’t go back to the bottle-Os, even if we find some beer bottles,“ I said.
He just mumbled something about next time we should take our sibiling and pretend we were from Dandenong West.
“Not me!“ I said.
“Old Bill may not have the speed to catch us, but he is certainly not that stupid!“
