Читать книгу Cops, Crocs & Leopard-Skin Jocks - Bob Magor - Страница 15

It’s certainly a beautiful part of the world on the Wearyan River. We sat around the multi-purpose fire at dawn watching the world wake up. The water was a mirror, with water birds active around the shore and kites riding the thermals above. The scrub glowed with the first shafts of sunlight.

‘It doesn’t get any better than this,’ I ventured as I sipped on my steaming mug of tea.

‘Yeah, all these Top End rivers are peaceful,’ Roy agreed. ‘That’s part of the attraction that gets inside your head until you can’t leave. But the peaceful times out on the Mary River couldn’t outweigh the police harassment I was copping in Darwin. Whenever they sighted me they hung all types of shit on me. The charges on my conviction sheet mention every conceivable offence: using threatening words; parking within six feet of a fire hydrant; fighting in a public place; driving an unregistered motor vehicle; failing to give address; indecent language; speeding through an intersection; hindering police; larceny; reckless driving; no rear number plate; failing to destroy a registration label!

‘These were all offences that most people in Darwin at the time could do and only get chatted for, if that. I was different. They kept me on the move. It was all a big game between them and me. They’d take me to court and fine me but I wouldn’t pay. After a while they’d get me back in court and I’d plead that I was on the dole and couldn’t pay. Then they’d decide that I would pay ten bob a week until the fine was paid. I wouldn’t do that either so a few months later they’d haul me back into court and put me in gaol for a week or two depending on how much I owed. That would square the ledger until they booked me for something else. I remember them fining me for something minor once and I said that it was going to cost them more than me. They asked what I meant by that and I just laughed. That night I drove around pushing over white reflector posts with my Toyota until I reckoned that the damage was more than the fine. Stuff ‘em!

‘They finally put me in Fanny Bay Gaol for nine months on a larceny charge. The item that I’d borrowed didn’t warrant such a heavy sentence but with all the minor convictions I’d copped over the previous year it was decided that I was a menace to society and should be given a stiff penalty to teach me a lesson. Poor misguided fools!

‘When I got out, a mate of mine, old Keith Waldock was waiting to pick me up.

He was a great bloke and a real legend around the area. He needed help. He ran quite a big business shooting horses and buffalo for pet meat out on the plains. This paid well and was very popular with the station owners because it got rid of a lot of feral animals competing for grass with their cattle.

‘He also trapped pigs in the bush. He had a big yard next to his house in the scrub where he turned them out to fatten. He would quieten them down and put them on decent tucker. He did quite well flogging off the younger pigs for meat around the town.

‘I learnt a lot from old Keith. He and his family had been pet-meating for years and had the game sewn up. When I worked for him he was spine-shooting buffalo from his Nissan. In the early mornings, the buffalo would come out of the scrub to feed and would be out in the open. He’d round them up on the plains and run them for awhile to puff them out. It was an easy job then to pull up alongside and shoot them in the spine and immobilise them. This may sound barbaric in this day and age but it was very practical. We’d shoot ten or a dozen in this manner.

‘If we shot them all dead at once they would be blown up and half rotten by the time we’d processed the third buffalo. If we only shot a couple, the others would be back in the scrub where we had no chance to find them until they came out to feed again.

‘It was then a simple job to shoot them dead just before we processed them. Once we’d killed and bled a beast, we’d start skinning and break up the carcass as it lay on the skin. This kept the meat clean before it was loaded into huge iceboxes containing big blocks of ice and water.

‘Even though it was hot dirty work with all the blood and flies, it paid well and also gave the coppers the idea I was going straight!

‘Later on, a mate of mine, Colin Powell and myself had a go on our own with a short wheelbase Toyota and a huge icebox in the back. We did all right for awhile but we really needed lots of manpower that knew what they were doing to handle the numbers to make it really profitable.

‘Old Keith was mixed up in lots of lurks, but for me, the most interesting part of his money-making capers was the fishing. He was a very good fisherman so I watched him like a hawk and took particular notice of all the spots where he went. He fished with a line all the time but he reckoned that nets would be the way to go. Old Keith was fairly straight with regard to the law and nets would be illegal in the areas we were helping him fish. There’s that word again. Ill-eagle!

‘By this time I had a house with Marjorie Horrell and Junior, Lisa and Sharon. I now wanted to go fishing full-time on my own. I was a fisherman from way back and I could see how much money could be made with nets. I had a slight problem though. I had all the expertise but I had no gear.

‘I teamed up with a mate called Johnny Bell. Johnny and the law didn’t always see eye to eye, so that made him an ideal business partner for the likes of me. He had a car but we had nothing else. One night we went down to the wharf in Darwin and found a boat that no-one appeared to want so we borrowed it. We spotted a couple of nets in the backyard of old Ridsdale, a crocodile skin buyer in Darwin. He didn’t appear to be using them so we borrowed them as well. It was a great way to start a business with no capital. Free enterprise was alive and well.

‘We did very well because the Mary River was virtually untouched at that time. It wasn’t long before we traded in the borrowed boat and bought an outboard motor and a Toyota to navigate around the river systems.

‘Johnny and I had a lot of fun. He was full of tricks and a mad pommy bastard. I remember one day we were out at Dick Ward Drive where we were camped. Johnny was digging out banana suckers to replant and there was quite a mob of young bucks laying back and watching. Johnny came across this big lizard about a foot long. He grabbed it and brought it across to show the onlookers.

For a joke I said, “I bet you ten dollars you can’t eat it.”

“You’re on!” Johnny laughed. Next thing we see is the lizard’s head disappearing down Johnny’s throat. We all sat there, stunned. This wasn’t natural.

‘As we watched in disbelief we saw the lizard being quickly hauled back out of Johnny’s mouth. It had latched onto his tongue and wasn’t letting go. He was swearing incoherently with a mouth full of lizard. His tongue was eventually pulled about six inches out of his mouth with the lizard still attached.

‘Johnny never had a tooth in his head, so he couldn’t bite it. Realising the lizard wasn’t going to let go, he went back to Plan A and began to swallow it again. His old gums were munching away and I began to vomit. My son Junior was only a kid but he looked scared as he saw the last of the tail disappear.

‘Old Johnny licked his lips and put his hand out for the money. I thought I was going to die. I laughed and vomited. What a performance. I’d lost my teeth while being sick so I had to search through the little piles of my own spew to find them.

‘I paid up, but that wasn’t the end of his impromptu meal. He couldn’t have been feeling all that well himself at this stage because he took off to the dunny. Like most Top End toilets, ours had a mob of frogs that called the cistern their home. When Johnny pulled the chain, all these little legs hung down in the flush of water. He grabbed one of these frogs and when he returned he announced, “And this is dessert.” And down went the little frog. We all started dry-retching again.

‘We had a lot of good times and made a lot of money. Eventually we each went on our separate ways and both did very well.’

‘Lucky you’ve got a long drop,’ I ventured, ‘or Anne’d be serving up frogs for lunch.’

‘Or lizard shish-kebabs,’ laughed Roy.