Hunger Town (30 page)

In desperation she turned and struck the nearest horse with her placard. A baton thumped her raised arm. Men now grappled with police, struggling to drag them out of their saddles. The baton attacks became more vicious and indiscriminate.

In front of me, wedged beneath the belly of a horse, a toddler crouched, frozen with terror. In a minute he would be trampled to death. I dropped Winnie's hand and leapt forward. I smelled the horse's sweat and saw warm damp beads glisten along its belly. A baton struck my shoulder, nearly knocking me over but I reached out, grabbed the child's arm and yanked. The baton descended again but I had freed him. Beside me Miss Marie seized hold of him.

Through the excruciating pain in my shoulder I looked up and met the stoniest eyes I ever remembered having seen. With my uninjured hand I searched my pocket and felt the cold hard comfort of the marbles. A moment and I had them out. I cast them viciously beneath the horse.

Beside me Winnie screeched, ‘You swine! You dirty bloody rotten swine!' And simultaneously she lobbed her handful of marbles, not on the roadway, but straight upwards at the policeman's face. I saw him rear back, lifting his baton arm to protect his eyes. Through a sick haze, I watched the marbles, a shower of glinting colour, fall about him. One stuck briefly in the horse's mane before it rolled to the ground. I noted it was a brilliant turquoise.

Faintly I heard Miss Marie gasp before she also hurled her marbles onto the road. There followed a wild skittering of hooves, a slithering, a snorting and a neighing, followed by a series of crashes. Helpless as wooden pegs in a bowling alley and almost in unison, the row of mounted police lost their balance and horses and men pitched to the ground.

The crowd, no longer penned, flowed over and around them and the three of us. Winnie and Marie helped me across the concrete apron to the side of the warehouse and an old bench. I sat down nursing my arm. ‘The others,' I muttered. ‘My mother?' And then I fainted.

My mother, shocked but unhurt, eventually found the three of us. She was torn between her concern for Mrs Danley, whose arm was obviously broken, and her worry about where I might be and if I were hurt. Miss Marie took over, reassured her about my welfare, and sent her back to help Mrs Danley who was stranded with Ailsa.

I was rather hazy about how I reached home but had a vague memory of Miss Marie finding a taxi. Winnie sat beside me cradling my hand and weeping hysterically. ‘Don't die, Judith, please don't die.'

I managed a weak ‘Don't be silly, Winnie, of course I won't die.' But she would not be consoled.

Before the march I would have been impatient with her tears but I recalled the shower of marbles, a kaleidoscope of colour in the brilliant sunshine, cascading in deadly beauty about the mounted policeman.

‘Winnie, didn't Harry tell you where to throw the marbles?'

‘Of course,' she hiccuped, ‘but a lot of use that would have been. He was hurting you. I had to use my own initiative.'

‘Oh, Winnie,' I said tearfully. ‘Oh Winnie, you're such a card.'

Miss Marie ordered the taxi to take me first to the small casualty hospital where Dr Banks was in attendance. I was in such pain that he saw me immediately, although there were other women waiting, most of them distressed. He probed and pushed and made me move my fingers and open and shut my hand and finally pronounced that I had been lucky. There were no broken bones, only severe bruising.

‘And where have you been to get like this?' he admonished.

‘The women's march,' I said flatly. ‘The police beat us up.'

Of course he had heard. ‘Harumph,' he said. ‘Such brutality.' He pursed his lips disapprovingly. ‘What is our society coming to? Such brutality.'

He put a sling on my arm and told me to take painkillers and rest. ‘No more marches,' he ordered as if I was still a child engaging in naughty practices. He stumped off and called his next patient from the long line of battered women.

Fortunately for me my left arm was damaged, not my right, so I could still draw. It was a miracle that in the mayhem on the wharf no one was killed. Babies, although tipped from their prams, had rolled harmlessly and been retrieved, crying but uninjured. One five-year-old boy had his front teeth broken but I heard his mother had been philosophical: they were baby teeth and he would lose them soon anyway. But many of the women were severely bruised from falls, batons and horse kicks. All were shocked and terrified by what might have been a more disastrous outcome.

The mounted police were constabulary enlisted from outside the Port. As it was useless to vent rage on them, the local police became the town's target of jibes and abuse. In shops and bars they found themselves jostled and harangued.

There may have been abuse of women at home but public abuse was seen as an outrage, a threat to everything society said it held dear—the sanctity of women, children and the home. From my experience at the soup kitchen I no longer believed that all the homes in the Port were sanctified but it was always good in a cartoon to appeal to what people thought they valued. So I worked on a cartoon entitled
The hand that rocks the cradle
and beneath the hooves of horses, and under the batons of police, women and babies were heaped on the road. Underneath it I penned the caption
Great Expectations: Women & children first
. And in a second cartoon I drew a woman bandaged from head to foot in a hospital bed while her skeletal child weeping beside her says,
But, Mummy, the nice policeman said the horse did it.

Although I heard the story from Harry, who heard it from Nathan, it was all over town that an incensed Mrs Danley, impressive with her broken arm in a sling and her face purple and swollen with bruises, stalked into the premises of the
Despatch
newspaper and demanded to see the editor. When he scuttled in she commanded him to print in full the petition we had been prevented from presenting at the Port Town Hall.

Unwisely, he demurred, even having the temerity to suggest that the women had brought the trouble on themselves by lacking ‘political wisdom'. It would have been better for him if he had kept a still tongue in his head. Enraged by his attitude, Mrs Danley told him roundly that if he refused he would be blacklisted by the congregation of St Paul's Anglican church and not one churchgoer would dare speak with him again.

Faced with her threat, he buckled, and the petition appeared in large print on the second page. In addition there was a statement about the number of people who had signed it and a grovelling sentence or two suggesting that the younger members of the police might have ‘over-reacted'. After all, they were dealing with women and children, not burly wharf-labourers.

But from then on he ordered his staff to keep watch for Mrs Danley, and, on the few occasions she went to place an advertisement in the column for church news, he fled out the back and hid in the lavatory.

Of course the
Despatch
and the
Register
had proclaimed a victory for the police in preventing the illegal attack on volunteer labourers who were merely doing their job loading wheat onto the
Van Spilbergen
. The women marchers were ill-advised in allowing themselves to be used by gangs of hoodlums who came armed with bottles and chunks of wood to throw at police also doing their duty. And it was disgraceful that some women were heard to use the sort of foul language only heard in bar rooms.

The
Workers' Weekly
on the other hand hailed it as a triumph for working-class action. Women who had previously been politically dormant had now erupted into a major force to be contended with. All hail the mothers of the revolution, it proclaimed.

A meeting of the Port Adelaide Trades and Labour Council passed a motion that ‘We protest strongly against the action of some mounted police riding down inoffensive citizens under verandas and along footpaths and using batons in defiance of British law and the Constitution which says a baton should be used only as a last resource and the Commissioner of Police is not under law an infallible authority to deprive citizens of their rights'.

When my father read this he hawked up a rich globule of yellow saliva and spat into the river. It was always his way of dispelling his disgust. ‘Feeble, futile bastards. Couldn't they come up with something better than that? Like supporting us to get the scabs off the wharves and back into our own jobs?' He spat again.

When Harry visited we sat together quietly, often not speaking while he held my hand. I asked him if Nathan's sisters had come out of it unscathed.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘not like you. They were unharmed, but Nathan said they were very distressed and quite affronted. He didn't seem to feel that their comment was strange so I said nothing.'

But I told my mother that they had been distressed and affronted. She guffawed. ‘Affronted? That's a good one. What next? Women chasing their babies all over the wharf, terrified that they'd be trampled to death or knocked into the river, but Nathan's sisters are merely “affronted”.' She slammed the lid on a saucepan of stew she was cooking. ‘Affronted? Go and have a good spit over the side into the river for me, Niels.'

Of course, Miss Marie also visited and after she had inquired about my health we discussed my work and I told her that cartoons were my compensation for not being physically able to change the course of things and I needed this emotional consolation.

My father said, ‘She's a very pretty woman, although maybe a little flamboyant. And what's this Froggy stuff she talks?'

I laughed. ‘Memories, I suppose. Like you occasionally recall a phrase in Icelandic.'

‘Mm,' he said. ‘I suppose so.'

Part 3
Political Cartoons

HARRY AND I DECIDED to marry in the spring. We needed somewhere to live in the Port. I refused to move to Adelaide, so far away from my parents and the river. To leave my cabin on the hulk and all its memories was difficult enough for me. So we went house hunting—somewhere suitable to rent—not too costly, but not as cheap as the hovels in Timson Street, renowned for housing the destitute.

It was easy to find available places. But although we searched together for our future home, and it should have been a joyous adventure, it was in fact sad and dispiriting. Many of the abandoned houses had stood empty for months. We saw miserable reminders of past tenants: a broken toy, a half-cleaned saucepan, a torn cushion, a tatty rag mat. More than likely the previous tenants had been evicted, forced out by lack of money. I wondered where they had gone.

‘I feel awful,' I told Harry. ‘It's as if I'm a vulture picking over the carcase of someone's life.'

He put his arm about me and kissed me. ‘Don't be sad, Judith. It's only a house. We'll make it ours.'

I did my best to match his cheerfulness. But there was more and more evidence that the Port community was wounded. Protests and beatings continued and the strikers and their families continued to struggle with grim-lipped determination. They had no alternative, proud people refused to crawl into holes and die. They fought not only the public battles and brawls on the streets but the petty pinpricks of government officials determined to show their power over people less fortunate and more helpless than themselves.

Everyone knew it was coming but this didn't relieve the anger and dismay when beef was removed from the ration cards.

Mr Mountford, our butcher, rebelled in a small manner against the regulations. I had waited in his shop with my ration card while he dispensed the usual ration of chopped up bits of fatty mutton to the tight-lipped women in the queue ahead of me. Mostly he handed over the meat with a shamefaced apologetic murmur, but that day he singled out a woman more desperate than the rest.

‘Why, Mrs O'Brien,' he said, his tone bluff and kindly, ‘how are you? And that brood of lovely kiddies you have? Seven, isn't it?'

She was a small haggard, anxious woman, thin to the point of emaciation. He chucked her meat on the wrapping paper and by a quick sleight-of-hand reached under the counter for something extra. Hurriedly he wrapped it all together and handed it to her.

‘A little something to give it extra flavour, missus. That'll put roses in the kiddies' cheeks.'

He winked at me, knowingly. I smiled back. We all knew that he regularly secreted a few pieces of good gravy beef in Mrs O‘Brien's rations.

None of us had noted the two strangers who had entered and were standing at the back of the shop. I think I saw them first. In their dark suits they smelled of officialdom.

‘Quick, Mrs O'Brien,' I said, ‘put the meat in your basket and leave.' I gave her a little push but she was confused and still clutched the parcel in her hand.

One of the officials shoved through the waiting women to stand in front of the counter. Before Mrs O'Brien realised his intentions he snatched the parcel from her, flung it down on the counter and proceeded to unravel the paper wrapping. All chatting in the shop ceased abruptly. All eyes were riveted on Mrs O'Brien, who, red-faced and desperate, tried to rewrap and reclaim the meat.

He pushed her hand away and she burst into a storm of weeping. He looked her over, his eyes thin and rapacious. ‘Now, madam, that's enough of that. You know your entitlements.'

He poked around in the small heap of fatty mutton and discovered the few bits of gravy beef. ‘And what have we here?'

He turned triumphantly to his companion. ‘Beef, I'll be sure.'

Mr Mountford remained silent but there was hatred in his eyes as he looked at his accuser and shame as he looked at the weeping Mrs O'Brien. ‘Judith,' he appealed to me helplessly.

‘You're a pair of curs.' I glared at them. ‘A pair of rotten curs, hunting down the starving. This woman has seven children to feed. What's it to you if she has a few pieces of gravy beef?'

‘None of our business, girlie. It's regulations and we're here to uphold them.'

Incensed by the ‘girlie', their contempt and heartlessness, I raged at them. ‘Give her back her meat right now. Can't you see that these women go home to starving children?'

They both shrugged. ‘None of our business, girlie, and none of yours. And any more lip from you and we'll close down this establishment, pronto. This parcel of meat is evidence. What do you all expect on the susso? Tell your husbands to get a job and pay for your keep and all your brats'.'

They turned to leave the shop but the silent women now blocked their way.

‘Move aside, ladies.'

No one budged. Someone hissed, a soft sibilance that escalated and then crescendoed into a sinister threat that filled the shop.

‘Let us pass, ladies.'

But now their strident command held a note of panic.

‘Not likely', Mrs Rawlings said.

‘We'll take that meat,' Mrs Pole said, and reached for the package.

They tried to back away but were trapped by the press of bodies.

‘It's evidence!' They tried belligerence.

‘Evidence?' Mrs Rawlings snarled. ‘We'll evidence you. Hand it over and now or we'll take it.'

The two of them shrank. Their belligerence had turned to squeaking. ‘You'll be sorry for this, all of you. The police'll be here. Threats to government officers.'

‘Oh, shut up,' Mrs Pole said. ‘We'll tell you what threats are. Come here again and we'll tar and feather both of you. There's plenty of tar down the timber yards and plenty of local chooks we can pluck. You leave Mr Mountford alone, because if he closes we'll come for you and your kind. You pass the word around.'

They stuttered. ‘Threats won't g-g-get you anywhere, ladies.'

With a jeering laugh the women half carried, half-shoved the two officials out the door and flung them onto the roadway. They lined the footpath, watching their victims scramble to their feet and then, as they made a last effort to stand their ground, Mrs Rawlings grabbed a broom leaning against the doorway and rushed at them.

They fled before her down the street. She returned breathless but triumphant. Of course, when it was over, they feared reprisals but no government officials came again to Mr Mountford's shop and his right to dispense rations in exchange for ration cards continued. It was a small victory, much talked about and it cheered everyone. But it was only local. As for the bigger picture, the beef marches and the hunger marches began.

I penned my cartoons as a response to the incident: two dogs, wearing hats of government officials, sniffing around a butcher's shop and one saying to the other,
Can you smell beef? I'm certain I can.
And a second one, more vulgar: two dogs with official hats on their heads outside a butcher's shop, one with his leg cocked against the doorway and the caption,
How many now have we had to mark for giving out this beef? I'm running out of pee.

My father chortled at this, but my mother was a little shocked. ‘Judith, do you have to be vulgar?'

I was tart. ‘Not half as vulgar as starvation, Mum.'

‘Leave her alone, Eve,' my father said. ‘The blokes will love that one.'

Harry and I found a suitable house. It was a small working-man's cottage in Divett Street with a central hallway, a bedroom and living room, and a small kitchen and bathroom at the rear. The bathroom had a chip heater but there was a newer gas water heater above the kitchen sink. When I turned on the hot water tap the pilot light ignited the gas and there was a delightful popping sound. I turned it on and off a couple of times just to amuse myself.

‘Listen to this, Harry,' I said.

He grinned and hugged me.

There was a small enclosed veranda, which might have been a child's bedroom. In a lean-to shed out the back there was a copper and a trough and clothes mangle. The backyard was a narrow ribbon of unkempt grass and weeds.

The house had served as a shop as well as a home and had been extended at the front to include a small room with shelves and a counter. It seemed to have been used for serving fruit and vegetables, for in a corner were a few old crates labelled SOUTH AUSTRALIAN TOMATOES. I recalled Nathan's stump in the Botanic Gardens. What an awkward green girl I had been—so shy, so clumsy.

‘Does Nathan still speak at The Stump?' I asked Harry.

He was roaming about the room, inspecting and prodding the woodwork for borers.

‘Sometimes, I think, but his main job now is to educate the comrades.'

‘He always had a book in his hand at the Chew It.'

‘Still has. And expects us all to do the same. Could you believe it, Judith? But I'm now struggling with Lenin's
The State and Revolution
and Jack London's
The Iron Heel
. There's not much humour in either.' He chuckled. ‘But I tell Nathan that I prefer Jack London. At least he makes some pretence of writing a story.'

‘I read Jack London years ago. Joe Pulham introduced me to his
White Fang
and
Call of the Wild
. They weren't political but they were marvellous tales. He killed himself, Harry.'

‘Not Joe. I never heard that.'

‘No, Jack London.'

‘I don't think there are borers in this counter, Jude, but we'll get rid of it just in case.'

I smiled lovingly at him. Harry lived in the present. It was rare that memories from the past saddened him with any sense of time passing. Once he said to me that he liked the communists because they concentrated on the future and it was such a hopeful future.

‘When you'll be paid to dance,' I had gently teased him.

‘Of course,' he replied. ‘You know that's my chief motivation.'

But I wasn't certain that Harry really understood himself. Sometimes he seemed to be seeking something, rather like now, with head down and eyes peering for the tiny telltale holes left by borers.

To my amazement and consternation the
Workers' Weekly
rejected my cartoon of the two government officials dressed as dogs urinating on the butcher's wall. I had been certain that they would share my sense that its nastiness aptly matched and countered the beastliness I had witnessed in the butcher's shop. Those officials had shown a personal and vindictive malevolence and deserved nothing better than the way I had portrayed them.

The reason for rejecting my cartoon was brief and abrupt. It was in bad taste. Too vulgar for their readers. It would lower the tone of the paper that aimed to be uplifting.

I read and re-read these cold comments. Had they come from the editor or some office boy? I was angry but also discomforted, finding it hard to shake off an uncomfortable feeling that somehow I had committed an indiscretion. I showed the rejected cartoon to Miss Marie. I was in class practising my pen strokes. I still had much to learn about hatching and scribbled strokes. Sometimes I found it hard to create the decisive but fluid strokes so telling and so necessary.

Miss Marie constantly admonished me, ‘You are too tense, Judith. Relax. Feel the stroke flow first in this direction then in another.'

I liked working in pen and ink and had a collection of various nibs, some fine, some coarser, and occasionally I collected a dropped feather from the deck of the hulk and fashioned it into a quill. It was easy to carry several pens, a pad and a small bottle of ink in a bag and make quick sketches outside. As well as my cartoons I had a collection of drawings of people and scenes from the Port. One day I would develop them into larger more complete works.

But at the minute I found myself obsessed with not only my disappointment but also a sense that what I had assumed I knew and understood had no reality. I had discounted Harry's comments that the
Workers' Weekly
wanted my cartoons to reflect more nobility, believing it a piece of nonsense. Now I could see that my view of what was true didn't suit the party line.

‘What do you think of it, Miss Marie?' I asked while I drew a line so wobbly that I threw the paper aside.

She read it and laughed. ‘
Ma pauvre
Judith, and what did you expect?'

‘Respect for my work. It's a good cartoon. Good cartoons should offend.'

‘But you didn't expect it to offend the comrades?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘
Ma pauvre
Judith,' she repeated. ‘You perhaps haven't realised how straight-laced the comrades are. They are not, you know, so different from everybody else. Little things can discomfort and offend them and they'll make the most of it.'

I put my pen aside. It was useless to continue to grapple with graceful fluid lines. I was too incensed. ‘And what price, then, their passion for revolution to change society?'

She smiled wryly. ‘That's an entirely different matter, Judith. That is in the head, not in the sensibilities. You should not expect people to be consistent. It's at odds with your cartoons, which are built on a clever awareness of the inconsistencies, banalities and even venality of people. The comrades are puritans,
mon amie
, modern Cromwellian Roundheads.'

I recalled Nathan's extreme embarrassment at finding me dishevelled in Victoria Square after the ‘riot'. ‘Mmn,' I said. ‘That fits.'

She gave me an odd look but I didn't explain.

‘Send your cartoon to
Spearhead
,' she chuckled. ‘Tell the editor …' She scrummaged around in her handbag. ‘I have his address here somewhere. Tell the editor that I recommend you. And,' she threw me a naughty look, ‘that the
Workers' Weekly
has rejected it. That should tickle their fancy. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.'