Jack Looks Back, with JACK JOHNSON
THE council storage yard was on a small island of land in McCrae Street.
It was bordered at the rear by Boyd and McClennan lanes and was about where today’s CWA meeting rooms and public toilets are, in the Plaza section of McCrae Street.
The open brick drain and bridge ran across McCrae Street, almost in front of the storage yard.
Dandenong Shire Council stored some of their materials and equipment there. We often explored this yard and climbed over the various pieces of equipment left lying around.
There were horse-drawn graders and rollers, horse-drawn scoops, and large tip drays with wooden-spoked, iron-rimmed wheels.
And of course there were iron-wheeled furphies with a road sprinkler bar across the back.
After nicking a couple of dad’s or Uncle Gordon’s hand-rolled cigarettes, Nipper and Guss had wandered down McCrae Street looking for somewhere to smoke them.
Prior to this they had tried smoking rolled up brown paper, but this was a disaster, as Guss burnt his eyebrows and both of them burnt their throats and nearly choked.
This time, they had the real McCoy – good quality Log Cabin, fine cut tobacco, rolled in gum-rice papers.
‘None of that bloody repeater rubbish!’ as Uncle Gordon always told us when he sent us down to buy tobacco and cigarette papers from either Mr Simon’s barber shop opposite the town hall or old Mr Evans’ shop on the Pultney Street corner.
They even had a used Log Cabin tin to carry them in.
They planned to go under the bridge over the open brick drain and smoke their ill-gotten gains, but as they reached the bridge, two senior citizens were leaning against the wooden railings having a yarn.
They walked off into the council yard looking for a spot where they would not be seen from the street and climbed onto the shaft end of the furphy tank, where the lid opening and filler hole was.
Usually the lid opening on the furphy carts was at the back end, but this one was at the front.
These openings normally had a heavy domed cast-iron lid with raised lettering as did the cast-iron ends of the tank, but the council workers, or some needy person, had pinched this one.
Nipper and Gus must have still been fairly small when they lowered themselves into the tank, because the opening was not much bigger than a milk bucket.
Once inside they squatted down and lit their cigarettes.
It was not long before a stream of blue-grey smoke was issuing from the tank.
With the amount of smoke they were producing, they must have been puffing like a steam engine pulling a passenger train up Pretty Sally hill.
Just at this moment a bedraggled looking swaggie – with a beard and hair so thick and matted that all you could see of his face was his flaring nostrils and wild eyes – was walking along McCrae Street heading for the stock market, where they usually camped in the roofed-over wooden sheep and calf pens.
Seeing the smoke coming from the furphy tank, his curiosity got the better of him.
He dropped his swag on the grass, stepped over a fallen rail of the old post-and-rail fence and walked through the yard to the furphy cart.
He peered in at the two startled kids, who yelped with fright.
The swaggie, being a bit startled himself, yelled the Lord’s name, hyphenated by a bloody in the middle and followed by, ‘what the bloody hell’s going on here?’
Then, just as suddenly as he had come, he picked up his swag and headed off.
Nipper and Guss were so shocked they thought the devil himself had just poked his fearsome head into the furphy.
Terrified that he was still waiting for them, they cowered in the tank for about 20 minutes.
Even when they re-joined me where I was sitting on the rail at the side of Old Patto’s paddock, they still did not believe me when I told them that the evil one was just a swaggie.
