The Last Snake Man Page 8

  Jack was a Jack of all trades and master of the lot. Over the next few months, he taught me all the secrets of living in the bush. At one point we were living on kangaroo-tail stews and soup. Jack used to shoot a roo every time we came back from our odd jobs around the area, like pruning fruit trees, fencing and dead woolling (where you pull the fleece off dead sheep—not the most pleasant job in the world but it was worth a pound per pound). He’d skin the roo and get the meat for feeding his dogs.

  In fact, there’s something I’m still a little bit ashamed about today. One time, when I went back from Sydney to Leeton, I took my javelin with me.

  ‘See if you can spear a kangaroo,’ Jack said. I was on the back of his ’48 Ford ute, chasing the roos and I put the javelin right into the chest of one bloody poor beast. He only went 10 yards and the javelin fell out, then he went down hard, the poor bugger, and he was dead as a doornail. I felt really sorry for him and I’d never do that again. But we cut him up and took him back to Leeton, all the same.

  Jack and I used to travel around, picking up casual work where and when we could, everything from fencing to pruning fruit trees. One of the more interesting jobs we had was to do fancy pruning in the millionaire John Hunter Patterson’s gardens at his homestead called Hartwood, near Conargo, between Hay and Deniliquin. It was a big place with fancy gardens where the royal family had stayed. The block around the homestead would have been 3 or 4 acres, with beautiful gardens and a big driveway leading up to the house. There was a stunning tree outside her bedroom, trimmed down by professionals over the years to look like a big wedding cake.

  They had a professional gardener—a Pommie bloke who dressed in an army uniform and was very proper. He hated us but they needed us once a year to help with the pruning because the gardens were so big. We were happy because we could eat lamb or any meat we wanted straight off the paddock.

  Hunter Patterson was getting on in years but he was always out on his horse, riding his property. The lady of the house was something else, though. She was the old bloke’s second wife and was a lot younger than him. She obviously liked a drink but she had all the airs and graces.

  ‘Renwick,’ she said to Jack. ‘Come over here, Renwick. I want to show you something.’

  ‘Mrs Hunter Patterson, my name’s Jack, or Blue if you like,’ he said. ‘I don’t like this “Renwick” business. I don’t call you “Hunter Patterson”.’

  ‘Oh, okay then,’ she said. ‘Come over here, Blue.’

  She wanted us to trim this beautiful wedding-cake tree, which was outside her bedroom window. It had been there for about 80 years.

  ‘The birds are driving me mad,’ she said. ‘They keep me awake of a morning, chirping.’ So we trimmed a little bit but she said, ‘No, no. Cut more.’

  We couldn’t cut any more without ruining the tree but she insisted, and in the end it looked like a big slice had been taken out of the cake. All the jackaroos and the jillaroos had got the word out and they were coming up from the paddocks to see what was going on. The head gardener told us we were going to be in serious trouble when the old man saw what we’d done. It was terrible but, ironically, the birds loved it. They were jumping into where we’d chopped.

  So Jack went to Mrs Hunter Patterson: ‘Look, it’s a long weekend coming,’ he said. ‘Can you give us our cheque and we’ll go early? Just deduct our half-day and we’ll be on our way.’

  So she gave us a cheque and we got out of there before the old bloke saw what we’d done to his tree. We never ever went back. The old bloke would have shot us.

  Jack used to ask me to take his family to the pictures on a Thursday evening.

  ‘Why don’t you come too?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. I’ve got something on,’ he replied. So I would take his family to the movies every Thursday night. It was one of those outdoor cinemas where you sat in deckchairs. One night it was raining and there would be no movies on, so Jack took me aside.

  ‘John, I’d like to tell you why you go to the movies,’ he said. ‘I just trust you’ll keep this to yourself.

  ‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘What’s that, Jack?

  ‘We’re having a meeting tonight at my place,’ he said. ‘It’s a Communist Party meeting.’

  ‘Well, that don’t worry me,’ I said. ‘I’m not involved in politics, but my father was a great unionist and believes in the unions, and the old gentleman next door is a real red.’ That old fella was the great-grandfather of John Sutton, the South Sydney Football Club captain, but that was before they learnt what an arsehole Stalin was; at the time, everyone thought Stalin was a good bloke. I didn’t want to get involved and they didn’t know me so I just sat in the back room while they had a mumble about the latest news and their membership and the people that supported them but never went to meetings. It wasn’t that big a deal.

  After he moved away from Wamoon, Jack became the union delegate for the Liquor Trades Union and was living at Wollongong when he died. Helen and I went down to his funeral, and Helen had a black dress on with red shoes I’d never seen before.

  ‘Red shoes?’ I said. ‘Where did you get them?’

  ‘Oh, everybody’s wearing them now,’ she said. ‘It’s the fashion.’

  Well, when we got to the funeral, all the women were wearing them. Dozens of them, all dressed in black with red shoes. Then it hit me—Communist-red shoes! It was just a fluke that Helen had dressed the part.

  It was a magnificent funeral and religion never got a mention. One bloke got up to speak and what he said made sense of all the secrecy from before.

  ‘We’ve had a secret for life and we promised ourselves we’d never talk about it until one of us died,’ he said. ‘Jack was the main printer for The Tribune.’

  The Tribune was a communist magazine and it used to be distributed free, or sold for just a penny or something small. I never had reason to buy one, but Dad used to buy it—all the trade unionists did. In 1951 the Australian government had held a referendum to try to ban the Communist Party but it had failed. But its members weren’t exactly welcome in some parts, and The Tribune had to be printed in secret or the police would have come and smashed up the press. They’d get warnings that the police were on their way and they’d move the press to a different town. Jack was the main man and I’d had no idea until his funeral.

  He was a great guy. Out the back of his property at Wamoon he had a corn patch almost as big as my house.

  ‘What’s the corn for, Jack?’ I’d say.

  ‘I’ll show you one time,’ he said, and one day I got the call.

  ‘Hey, John, come out in the kitchen,’ he yelled. ‘And bring the rifle out, will you?’

  So out I came and looked out across the paddock and there were about six pigs walking towards us.

  ‘That’s Reberger’s pigs,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you which one to shoot.’ Reberger was a farmer on a property about a kilometre away, and it turned out that every now and then his pigs would come down to Jack’s for a feed of corn. Livestock roaming around large properties taking a feed where they could find it was common practice back then.

  We let the pigs have a feed first and Jack said, ‘That one there. Get him.’

  Boom! I got him right between the eyes and away ran Reberger’s pigs…minus one. We dug a big hole and gutted the pig and cleaned him up a bit and then we took him down to the abattoir at Yanco. The bloke there knew what was going on and he smoked and cured it and that pig was our food for a long time. That’s what the corn was for—it was pig bait.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘THIS ONE’S DEAD…’

  When I said I was done with athletics, that was true—but it wasn’t quite done with me. After a month or two in Leeton, I was missing a lot of my old mates and my family, so I came back to Sydney for a visit. The Commonwealth Games team had been picked for Cardiff and I don’t know who the athletes were, but Terry Gale, one of my mates who’d never beaten me, was selected for the sprint team. I was out training to keep myself fi
t for football, and Terry was there with four or five other blokes.

  ‘John, have a run with them if you want to,’ one of the coaches said. They were doing the 100 metres so I thought why not. It would be good to test myself, see how much speed I’d lost. Having decided these blokes were going to thrash me, I left my track top on so I’d have an excuse for getting beaten.

  There I was, down on the blocks alongside Terry, bang went the gun—and I blitzed them. Terry’s father was his trainer, and he went off his head at him, cursing and shouting and going crook because I beat his boy and he was the Commonwealth Games representative. Eventually I heard Terry say: ‘Dad, he just beat me! That’s all.’ I never saw Terry again, from that day to this. He didn’t place in the 100 metres in Cardiff—all the medals went to the West Indies—but he and my other mate Jim McCann got bronze in the 4 x 110 metre relay. And that really was it for me and athletics.

  Early on when I was playing for Wamoon, we had a match against Tumbarumba. Afterwards Tumba offered me 250 pounds for the season plus a job as a rigger on the powerlines if I transferred to them. So I played football for Tumbarumba for two years, which is when I got noticed by the state selectors. I was getting a reputation as a fast but hard player, and in 1959 I got picked for the Riverina Group 20 team against Group 9 and I scored six tries. Then I was selected for Country against City—a traditional game that was played right up until 2017 before no-shows killed it off when clubs started withdrawing their players. The next year I was in the Riverina side again and I got picked in Country Seconds.

  In one game my opposite number was Brian Carlson who’d played for and captained Australia in twelve Test matches and been overseas with the Kangaroos. He taught me a lesson about experience and street smarts.

  Carlson was fast but I reckoned I was faster, so I was just looking for an opportunity to see what he really had. At one point the ball was kicked down the field and we both took off after it. I swerved around Carlson but he grabbed my shirt, slowed me down and put me off balance. Tackling the man without the ball is illegal, even in rugby league. I yelled out but Carlson just said, ‘Wake up, son, this is what it’s all about!’

  In 1960 I was picked in the Probables versus Possibles, a trial match that has also fallen by the wayside in the modern era, which they used to select the New South Wales team. I was playing against Ken Irvine, who was two years younger than me and just starting to make a name for himself. He was built like a greyhound and had speed and acceleration to match, with a breathtaking sidestep and swerve. But I knew his times from athletics so I knew I was faster—and now it was my turn to be the old bull teaching the young bull how it’s done.

  Ken got the ball and raced towards me, then tried his swerve. But I caught him and, using his momentum, threw him yards over the sideline. He landed on one of the St John Ambulance men sitting on their bench on the halfway line waiting to treat any injuries. Ken needed treatment but it was the ambo who was stretchered off.

  So I was picked for the three-match series against Queensland; my kids found my team picture recently and there I am alongside John Raper and Reg Gasnier—two of the ‘immortals’ of the game—Norm Provan, Harry Wells, Rex Mossop and Keith Barnes. That team was coached by another legend, Clive Churchill. For the record, we played three matches and lost the series 2–1. I scored a try in two of the games: one at the SCG and the other at Lang Park in Brisbane.

  Round about that time, I had quite a few Sydney teams wanting to sign me up. Manly, St George and Balmain all invited me to trial with them and get paid 30 pounds a win, 20 pounds a draw and 15 pounds a loss. Considering the average wage back then was about 20 quid a week, it wasn’t bad money. Even more lucrative was an offer to play in England for around 3500 pounds a season. But I had my priorities. In fact, I was selected to play for New South Wales against the French national side in 1960 but knocked it back because I wanted to go on a snake-hunting trip with Pop and Eric Worrell. I told the league bosses I couldn’t play because I’d injured my leg by tripping over a dog while I was out running. Boy, didn’t the newspapers hop into me when they found out the truth!

  Would it have made any difference to my representative career if I’d taken these opportunities? We’ll never know. Shortly after I went back to playing for Tumbarumba, something happened that by rights should have ended my life, not just my playing career.

  Towards the end of my second season, I was playing in the semi-final at Wagga Wagga and was stepping in to tackle this bloke when my mate Peter Kelly accidentally tripped me and I fell down in front of the player I was aiming for. As I hit the deck, the other player put his knee into my neck and deliberately drove down hard. It was one of those things like a car crash—you see it coming in slow motion but there’s nothing you can do. Next thing I know, I’m completely paralysed, face down in the dirt and my whole body from the waist up is twitching.

  I’d just seen a movie with a character in it who’d broken his neck playing football or something like that. This flashed through my mind as I lay there for about a minute. Eventually they stopped the game.

  ‘How are you?’ somebody said, probably our captain–coach, Don Furner, who’d played for Queensland and Australia and later coached the Canberra Raiders.

  ‘It’s hard to move my arms,’ I replied. All I could hear was the crowd shouting abuse. They hated me. Their league team is a big deal down there and they were bagging me.

  ‘Don’t you do enough training at Tumbarumba?’ someone shouted.

  ‘I’m buggered,’ I said.

  ‘Bullshit,’ he replied. ‘Get out in the wing and just block.’

  There were no such things as replacements in those days. If a player went off you were down to twelve men, so I said okay. The same bloke who got me was running towards me all the time—he knew I was stuffed because I was holding my neck—and at one point he put his hand up to give me a palm. It was the greatest fluke of all time. I grabbed him by the wrist and his elbow, and he kept lunging while I went the other way…They said they could hear his elbow snap in the grandstand.

  After the match they took me to Wagga Base Hospital for an X-ray and they said, ‘Oh, you’re all right’.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but something’s wrong.’

  ‘No,’ they said. ‘You’re all right.’

  So we started back on the 110 kilometres to Tumbarumba. Halfway there was a place called Shanty Town, where we usually had beers, and everyone was patting me on the back because we won the game. Then we went all the way up the dirt road to the hotel where I was living and I was getting bounced all over the place. Next morning I couldn’t get out of bed and my arms were tingling and I couldn’t move. Alan Mundy—the contractor on the powerlines—came around and I told him I couldn’t go to work and he said he’d see me after.

  About an hour or two later there was a knock on the door and Don Furner came in. ‘John,’ he said, ‘I’ve got bad news for you. Your neck’s broken’.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got a bad break in your neck,’ he said. ‘They’ve just rung me from Tumbarumba Hospital.’

  On the Monday morning the senior doctor at Wagga had come in and reviewed all the X-rays from the weekend when they only had a skeleton staff on. And then he saw mine.

  ‘Well, this one’s dead,’ he says.

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ says the nurse.

  ‘Well, where is he?’ asks the doctor, because he hadn’t seen me on his rounds.

  ‘He’s in Tumbarumba,’ says the nurse.

  ‘What? You’re kidding!’ he says and gets on the blower to Dr Matterson at Tumbarumba, half expecting to hear I hadn’t made it. The local doc, who was a footy fan, phoned Don Furner.

  I don’t know how seriously they were taking it. Don said he’d asked the local doctor what they should do. ‘Wrap him up and don’t tell him till after he’s played the final,’ the doctor had said. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was joking.

  Don
got the doctor to come and see me and then they got me up to Tumbarumba Hospital. From there they took me to Wagga in an ambulance and that’s when the treatment started. They put me in a surgical collar and after a little while I was sitting up playing cards and moving around, and then they flew me to Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. I was coming up in a lift with an ambulance driver when the doors opened and there was David Abramovitch, a mate from athletics—he’d been a handy 440-yards runner for the Sydney University team—and was now a big-time orthopaedic surgeon.

  ‘It’s not you, is it? Your neck?’ he asked.

  When I said it was, he got these other two doctors he had with him and they held me by the head and walked me to a bed.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I’ve been walking around for days.’

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said. He’d had the X-rays sent with me and had had a look at them already. The crack in my vertebrae was right down to the spinal cord but, thankfully, no further.

  About 25 years later, I went for an X-ray on my shoulders—I forget what was wrong with them—and I knew the radiologist, Luke, because he worked with my daughter, Belinda.

  Luke walked in to see me. ‘John, are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, why?’

  ‘Your neck’s broken,’ he said. ‘There’s a big crack in your neck.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s always been there.’

  At Prince Alfred they wouldn’t even let me lie down on the bed. They put a board against my head, and strapped me to it. Then they picked the board up and laid me on the bed, put traction under my chin then pulled the board out. It was a bastard. When I came out of traction a few weeks later they said, ‘Well, that’s as good as it’s going to be.’ Next thing they were putting me in a full-torso plaster, from my hips to the top of my head with just a hole for my face and my ears. And that was me for the next two or three months.