Roundabout at Bangalow by Shirley Walker Page A

Then again you will go for miles upon miles and never see a blade of grass. The whole country is under a very severe drought out this way and everybody reckons that I have struck it at the worst possible time. It is very lonely up here not knowing a soul. I am stopping at the Tattersalls Hotel. It is a little low one-storied place and when you are having your meals the cats and dogs are fighting under the table. When I went into my room and struck a match about 500 of those great big cockroaches raced for the cracks in the wall .
    In a letter a few days later he describes Charleville as the queerest place you ever struck, and writes out for her a rude rhyme he’s found on an outhouse door and committed to memory, confident of their shared sense of humour:
    On Sunday afternoons half of the town goes to the football matches and the more religious ones go to the two-up school. They play two-up just at the back of the town on the river bank and hundreds of pounds change hands every Sunday … people never talk about how many acres of land they have, they measure it here by the square mile. One bloke told me he was working on a station, he said it was only a little place about 200 square miles and it is nothing to see a mob of 20,000 sheep travelling at once. I saw a good piece on a shit house door about the squatters and I will tell it to you as near as I can remember.
    The Western squatters queer birds they are
They catch their sheep and brand them with tar
They work the niggers with all their might
And ride the gins while young and tight.
They ought to have, God strike them dead
The skin of their arse pulled over their head.
    The only water we get here comes from artesian bores 1,000 feet below the surface and it is nearly boiling. You can get a hot bath here any time of the day … A bloke here told me today that I am not a bushman until I can eat a frill lizard between two pieces of bark for a sandwich and I told him I would never be a bloody bushman at that rate .
    Within days of his arrival he talks his way into one of the local football teams, scores two spectacular tries and is picked in the team to play Cunnamulla, 120 miles to the west, a fortnight later. The next week his team wins again, 36–13, and he is an instant celebrity. They will do anything to keep him in Charleville, at least until the big match — a bloke came up and gave me £2. He said it was to pay a weeks board with and in the meantime they are going to get me a good job .
    The team and most of the population of Charleville go to Cunnamulla on a special excursion train. Matches like this, often grudge matches, engender high excitement. It’s easy to imagine the drunken and riotous behaviour on the return trip, but he’s careful to reassure her about his own sober habits.
    [The train] was packed that way that you could hardly get a seat. We left here early in the morning and all along the line it was nothing to see 8 or 10 kangaroos going for their lives across the plains and there were emus going all roads when they heard the train coming. When a mob of roos would start across the plain everybody would lean out the window and start to barrack the same as if it was a football match. I think for every man in the train there were about 2 bottles of whiskey so you can imagine what it was like coming home, but I kept strictly sober all through the piece .
    Charleville is badly beaten (23–8) but he scores one of the tries, so is still in favour. How much is obvious in an incident later in the year when a police constable back home sends a tip-off that the police there are looking for him (probably for debt). He takes his problem to a Charleville policeman who is also on the football team, and is instantly reassured: if anything came through to them he would let me know in time to get away. Meanwhile the Christian Brothers pay his board while he is out of work — and so they should because we won the Charity Shield yesterday