The Last Snake Man Read online

  Some of the Kooris I hung around with were boxers, and I tried to help them with their road work to increase their endurance and lung capacity and the like. I used to make them run holding rocks in front of them until they were screaming in pain—but it built up their muscle endurance like you wouldn’t believe. A couple of them—Les Davidson and Willo Longbottom—were handy fighters, and I trained with them at Kingsford Police Boys’ Club occasionally, and sometimes at Woolloomooloo. We were all trying to get selected for Australia to compete in the 1958 Empire Games in Wales.

  Lo and behold, it turned out I had a knack for boxing too. I won the New South Wales amateur light-heavyweight title and me, Les Davidson and Willo Longbottom all made the final eliminations for the Australian team. For my final qualifier, they brought in Tony Madigan, who was pretty much a certainty for selection, so they would have reckoned this was just a formality.

  I knew Madigan was too good for me but I thought to myself, ‘If I get a big one on him he’s going to be in trouble.’ Well, it didn’t quite go to plan. He got a big one on me first and knocked me down in the first round. I got up, shook my head, and I was all right, so the fight started again. We were into it, tearing into each other, up against the ropes, punching on. Then suddenly the referee stepped in and said, ‘That’s it you’ve had enough.’

  Well, the crowd nearly brought the house down. It was a big mob and all my athletic mates and everyone was there. Although he was born and raised in and around Sydney, Madigan was fighting as the Queensland champion, so that got the crowd behind me too. Apart from anything else, they could see it was going to be a good scrap, but the ref said, ‘Nah, that’s it.’ So it was all over. When the referees say it’s over, it’s over—they know better.

  But if my fight was disappointing, Willo’s was a scandal. I can’t remember the name of the bloke he fought—probably just as well—but Willo gave him a good pummelling, from the first bell to the last. I was in Willo’s corner and we knew he’d won by a country mile, but when the announcer read the results, the referee raised the other bloke’s hand. To his credit, the other fighter said, ‘No way!’ pulled his hand down and walked off to his corner.

  All hell broke loose, both in the ring and in the seats, as the officials spoke to the ‘winning’ fighter. Eventually he came back into the centre of the ring, but when the ref raised his hand to indicate he was the winner he looked down at the ground, embarrassed and ashamed. Willo was told years later that it was because he was Aboriginal and they didn’t want to send a Koori boxer to the Games. I believe it. Racism was rife in those days—much more so than now.

  In fact, before the opening in Cardiff, a clause was added to the Commonwealth constitution banning discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, religion or politics. As a result, strong objections were raised when South Africa fielded an all-white team. Imagine what would have been said if they’d known how Willo was dudded.

  Having said that, the boxing officials weren’t all like that. They could see that Les had potential and they took him to Melbourne as part of the Olympic boxing team in 1956—even though he wasn’t going to compete. He was mainly there to spar with the fighters who were taking part but they gave him a uniform and accommodation and access to all the facilities, just as if he was competing. Strangely, at the time I didn’t know he was there. I never saw him around and I didn’t know where the boxers trained, so I didn’t find out until later.

  The day after the boxing match, I went bush to Leeton, near Griffith in the Riverina, with my Aboriginal mates. I didn’t find out until about four or five months later, when I came home to visit my family, that Madigan hadn’t been happy with our fight being stopped. Someone had got in touch with my parents and said he wanted to give me another fight. My folks said they didn’t know where I was, which was mostly true, but they didn’t ever like me fighting anyway.

  Madigan was a world-class fighter. He went on to win gold in Cardiff and again four years later at the Commonwealth Games in Perth. In between he won bronze in the Rome Olympics, being beaten in a dubious points decision by a young Cassius Clay—now better known as Muhammad Ali—in the light-heavyweight semi-final. Just eighteen months earlier, he’d also lost narrowly to Ali in a Golden Gloves bout in Chicago. That’s boxing for you: the winner goes around the world, the loser goes to Leeton.

  It was a different world back then in terms of racism, and not just in sport. I had to ask the warden’s permission to visit my Aboriginal mates in the Mission when I was a kid, and you had to be out before it got dark. It was a shame, because as I said, some of the Kooris I hung around with had terrific potential as athletes. My job at the Kurnell oil refinery was in construction and my first proper job. I was sixteen at the time and I used to go by ferry. When the boat would pull into the wharf, everyone used to try to be first off, for some reason, and jumped off the ferry’s roof onto the wharf. One day I was getting ready to jump and I was next to this Aboriginal bloke I didn’t know that well. I looked up and he was gone.

  Peter Mongta was his name, and he became a good mate of mine. He’d come from Cann River, Victoria. Pete could have been a great athlete. He could run like a tin hare and he was quite brilliant, but he was too shy. He used to come to the track with me and I would say, ‘Come on, Pete. Have a run’. But it was not for him. A lot of Aboriginal people don’t like pushing themselves forward like that. And then they would have had racial interference and obstacles put in their way anyway—discouragement instead of encouragement, if you like. Pete, unfortunately, died a number of years ago and I went to his funeral down at Cann River.

  As I said before, I was quite tanned back then and was sometimes mistaken for Aboriginal. Often after I’d been training at Rushcutters Bay I’d get a lift to the Matraville Hotel, where my mates usually drank, have a beer and see a couple of my mates and then run the mile or two home from there. One day I walked in to where my mates were and the barmaid said, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve Aboriginals here.’

  ‘I’m not an Aboriginal,’ I said, but she shook her head. She wasn’t going to serve me. I was angrier at being refused a drink than being mistaken for a Koori. That didn’t bother me at all.

  ‘Where’s the manager?’ I asked. ‘I want a word with him.’

  Brucie Reynolds, a mate of mine, said, ‘Oh, that’s him there in the corner having a drink with that fella.’

  So I walked over to this bloke and I said, ‘Your barmaid won’t serve me a drink.’

  ‘My barmaid?’ he laughed. ‘That’s a beauty. I wish she was.’

  He was just some random drunk. I looked around and everyone was laughing. I was fired up at being refused a drink, so I walked straight over to Brucie and I knocked him arse over head. We ended up being good mates but he copped it sweet that time. Then someone said the bar manager was upstairs, so I went looking for him. I didn’t know who he was but he knew me and I had a go at him.

  ‘Your barmaid won’t give me a drink,’ I said. ‘She said I’m Aboriginal and I can’t drink. What’s the difference anyway?’

  ‘Go down, John, go down straight away and I’ll look after it.’

  So I walked down the back stairs and around the front of the hotel. When I came back in the barmaid wasn’t there and the manager was pouring me a beer.

  ‘I want to talk to the barmaid,’ I said, intending to put her straight on a few things.

  ‘She’s sacked,’ he replied. He had no problem serving Kooris so he’d come straight down and fired her.

  Back in the day, a lot of hotels and pubs would refuse to serve Aboriginal people, and to drink legally Kooris had to carry what the government called an Exemption Card and they called a dog tag or dog licence. Basically, it was a certificate that said the holder was no longer under the provisions of the Aboriginal Protection Act and could move around freely and go to places and do things that were otherwise off limits to them, like drinking in pubs. Those who did have a card needed to be carrying it to be allowed to have a beer, so some o
f them would put it on a cord around their neck, inside their shirt when they were going out. Hence the name ‘dog tag’. Thankfully, it’s not like that today.

  To get one, you’d be inspected and interviewed by the Aborigines Welfare Board and have personal references saying you were a good upstanding citizen and all that. Most Kooris wouldn’t even apply for it. It was an insult to them and their culture. As time went on, the unions got very active in all this and would blacklist pubs that refused to serve Aboriginal people—just stop delivering beer to them. In any event, it was all swept away by the referendum in 1967, when Indigenous Australians were finally given citizenship.

  I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking I was a Koori. Half my mates were Aboriginal and I was pretty much part of their mob…still am. That’s why, after the Madigan fight, I went bush with my pals down to Leeton, thinking I could get away from the bullshit and bureaucracy of Australian sport. Needless to say, I was wrong.

  I had one more flirtation with boxing, several years later. I’d just arrived in Tumbarumba and the local show was on. There were a few sideshows already set up but nothing like the number Pop would have seen when he and Mum were on the road. One of those that were going up was Bell’s boxing tent, which I remembered from Pop’s stories of his days doing the rounds of the shows right up until the Royal Easter Show in Sydney in 1948. I spotted an older bloke I took to be Roy Bell himself and sure enough, he remembered Pop well—they were drinking mates.

  Sooner or later our chat got around to boxing and he was impressed with my record, so much so that he invited me to fight his champion. I don’t recall his name, but years before he had been an Australian champion, although it has to be said, like all older tent boxers, he was well past his prime, with a big belly but probably a box of tricks to outfox the average challenger.

  The way boxing tents work is that they line up their professional boxers of all shapes and sizes and they get locals who fancy themselves as fighters to challenge them from the crowd. Usually the locals are too drunk or hopeless, and a trained boxer can pick them off. The ring was a canvas square on the ground, and the ‘ropes’ were the people in the front row of the crowd, ready to push you back into the fight if you veered off in their direction. The fighters’ leather gloves were the only link to real boxing.

  Old Bell persuaded me to put my hand up, but the deal was for me to be beaten, as he never wanted his champ to lose a fight. All I had to do was lose and I’d get 20 quid—which was double a week’s wages. After a couple of rounds, it was clear that the ‘Champ’ wasn’t up to it, and I was starting to feel uneasy about the whole thing. I didn’t want to lose to this bloke but I didn’t want to hurt him either.

  In between rounds, Bell was getting quite aggressive, telling me we had a deal and all that. I mumbled that I wasn’t happy, so he said he would tell his fighter to manoeuvre himself to near a tent pole and I could do the rest. In the final round, first chance I got, I hit the tent pole then clutched my ‘broken’ hand. The 20 pounds were mine.

  After the fight the local policeman came up and asked me if I’d been paid. I told him I had and he said I was the only one. He had to step in and get the money for the local lads who’d fought. Old Bell wasn’t going to pay them but this was more than a week’s wages for some, so the copper sorted him out. This was not uncommon in some tents—but I got my cash so I was happy.

  CHAPTER 8

  ROUGHING IT

  The place we were staying in at Leeton, Wattle Hill, is a posh suburb now, but back then it was an Aboriginal shanty town, kind of like Hill 60 back in La Pa in the old days. My Koori mates had relatives there so I just shot through with them. My parents had bought me a car—a ’49 Ford Custom ute—so that I could drive them around because neither of them drove. I probably didn’t do that as much as they’d hoped, so I might have let them down a bit there. But they told me I could take it and off I went, with some of the lads in the back under the tarp.

  The accommodation in the house at Wattle Hill was owned by one of my Koori mates’ relatives and it was pretty basic. There might have only been a few other sticks of furniture in the house, but basically it was old beds and mattresses. It wasn’t too bad. We’d just sit around and have a yarn and have a feed—when we could afford it. We used to pick fruit, beans and grapes—whatever we could to make money to buy food and basic supplies.

  One day somebody said, ‘Let’s go get a sheep to eat.’ So I jumped in my truck and all my Koori mates were on the back when we came down onto the highway and, bugger me dead, there’s a sheep running along the road. So all the young Koori lads jumped off the truck and the sheep had no chance. We had our food, but we need to find somewhere to butcher it without being seen by any of the locals.

  So my white mate Freddie Bartlett says he’ll show us a good spot. We went out there, and there was a big sign: ‘Leeton Cemetery’. ‘No one’s going to worry us here,’ says Freddie, but the Koori lads went off their brains when they saw the sign, they were so scared. We had to go and cut the sheep up somewhere else, but we eventually got our lamb chops.

  There wasn’t a lot of drinking going on and no drugs, even though the marijuana trade was starting to kick in in that area. But there was always a drop of wine around. One day we went grape picking. There were four Kooris and Freddie and his wife, and we went out there picking grapes. It was a stinking hot day and they were offering us 3 pounds, 10 shillings a ton.

  We picked the grapes and put them in kerosene tins and they drove along in a truck and we’d throw the tins up to them. I had a look in the truck and saw that it would take a lot of grapes to make a ton. As it was a hot day, one of the lads asked if I could get them some water to drink, so I asked the Italian boss bloke where we could get some cold water as we were all thirsty.

  ‘Thirsty?’ he said. ‘I’ve got something better than water.’

  And he took us over to this shed there where he had a big keg of wine and told us to help ourselves. Freddie and I looked at each other—we knew this wasn’t going to end well. We went back to picking but one at a time our crew members kept sneaking away and getting a drink. I said to Freddie, ‘I think we’ll get out of here.’ Freddie had a little tin shed house off Wattle Hill, so I told the others I would see them back there.

  They hitchhiked back and I later on I saw them coming down the road, staggering in the heat.

  ‘How much did you get?’ I asked.

  ‘Four pounds, one and sixpence,’ they said.

  We had all worked for three or four hours picking—and they’d picked longer than me and Freddie—and all they got was about four pounds between the lot of us. That was the last time we went picking grapes. I wasn’t getting work and was doing it hard, so one of the local boys said, ‘Why don’t you have a game of football at Leeton and you might get a good job from them. They’ll look after you.’ I hadn’t played football since C grade when I was at school, but I’d had a little bit of a run at rugby union—a reserve-grade match when I was sixteen with Randwick—so I said okay.

  They said, ‘Go to the Hydro Hotel on the hill and you’ll see the football team bosses in there.’ It was quite funny. They said when you go through the front door turn to your left and on the bend there’ll about six blokes there and you’ll know it’s them because you’ll hear them talking about ducks,’ because the duck shooting was on. So I walked in and I walked up and sure enough, all I could hear duck this, duck that, duck duck duck.

  So I’m standing there listening to these blokes and one of them turned round and asked what I wanted.

  ‘If you’re the president of the football club here, I was just wondering about getting a game tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Aw, yeah. Just be down the oval at one o’clock,’ he said, hardly looking at me, and turned his back and started talking about ducks again.

  I reckoned that was a bit rude—he didn’t even ask my name—and I thought, ‘I’m not real keen on this bastard,’ so I walked back down the street where I bumped into Fre
ddie. When I told him about the rude bloke in the hotel, he said, ‘Don’t play for them, play for Wamoon.’ This was a little village about 9 kilometres from Wattle Hill. ‘We play against Leeton tomorrow,’ he said. That was good enough for me.

  Freddie took me out there. He didn’t play with them but he knew them and introduced me. They asked if I was any good and I said I could run a bit and that I’d played a bit of C grade and the odd game of rugby union. So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll give you a run with the first grade to try you out. One thing,’ they said, ‘you reckon you can run, but you’ve got a hard man to mark.’ They were talking about Ross Kite who played for Australia on the wing.

  ‘Don’t let him get away from you,’ they warned me, ‘because you won’t catch him.’

  Well he didn’t get away from me and I scored two tries against him. As soon as I came off the field, the Leeton president and his mate came rushing up to me.

  ‘You were supposed to be playing with us,’ he yells in my face.

  ‘I’m playing with Wamoon,’ I said and walked away from him.

  And that’s how I started playing rugby league.

  While I was living in Leeton, I got in tow with a character who had a big influence on me. I’d managed to strain the tendons in my groin playing for Wamoon and the doctor put me in hospital for a few days. One of the Wamoon Football Club officials, Jack Renwick, came to see me. Jack was a redhead and a real top bloke. He picked me up at the hospital and took me home, where we discovered my car had two flat tyres. My Koori mates must have had fun for the two or three days I was laid up. While Jack fixed the tyres for me, he had a look around at how I was living and said maybe I should come and stay with him and his family. He had a nice little house on an acre block in Wamoon, where he lived with his wife Mary and their two kids, who were probably around ten or twelve. Jack was about twenty years older than me.