The Herald Melbourne VIC  – 13 January 1934, page 24

My Life Outback as a Mule Driver’s Offsider
On The Track With One-Spur Dick
by Arthur W Upfield

To One-Spur Dick, I owe a debt never to be repaid. Here on Tearle Station, Western New South Wales, set down in the middle of the night by a mail driver and blurred into obscurity by lack of sleep. It had been One-Spur Dick’s drawling in-junction to

“Get up before the sun burns the whiskers off you,”

which woke me to this new world. Fully dressed, I arose from the soft sand beside the track where I had collapsed into unconsciousness on alighting from the buckboard, to observe four men regarding me with amused eyes, “Another parcel post bloke,” one observed, as though I were a beetle, “Yaas. English or Orstralion?” “What are you, young feller?” inquired | a one-eyed, thick-set, whiskery, sun-blackened man, dressed in blue shirt and moleskin pants, and wearing but one draggled spur. “English,” was my reply, as I gazed around me at the stone-built bungalow house and the skirting corrugated-iron buildings.

I slept part of the time while I ate breakfast and retained a dim memory of being escorted by the whiskery man to the men’s hut in which I slept the rest of that day and night. The following morning, with the others, I presented myself to the manager for orders and was told to assist the tinsmith. He was making two 4000-gallon iron water tanks, and my work was to hold a hammer head against which he riveted the curved iron sheets. It was mid-February, and the sun was trying. For two weeks I lived in close contact with Blue Evans, a 14 stone Welshman; Mick Conolly, a tall, flashily dressed stockman; Sam, a full-blood Aboriginal; Sam No. 2, a half-caste who shot galahs on the wing with a 22 bore rifle; the Wandering Burglar, and the wife of one Charlie Monger, and the mother of eight children, only two of whom were not half-castes and of course One-Spur Dick then the bullock driver.

Never before had I met such people; never have I met their like away from the Interior since. Their language was terrific, saved from crudeness by its artistry. Their leg-pulling was severe; tempers were quick, and fists were hard. Their hearts were big, their humour dry, and the standard of general knowledge surprisingly high. The tanks having been made, I was sent as offsider to One-Spur Dick to go fetch in the winter wood supply, with fourteen bullocks drawing an ordinary wagon. During the morning of the first day, when we were among dense mulga, it occurred to me — how would I get back to the homestead if my companion dropped dead? The one-eyed driver — he had lost an eye in a fight at Mount Brown— sternly repressed a leering grin and commanded me to use my brain. For half an hour, I endeavoured to do this, my cursed imagination producing vivid pictures of a lost man dying of thirst. Eventually, I admitted failure to use my brain, Dick said, with grave deliberateness, “I like a bloke who arsts questions. I got no time for a bloke, be he new chum English or new chum Australian, wot thinks he knows everything and arsts no questions to hide his ignorance.

Now you see them wheel tracks? You go and stand in one of ’em with your back towards the wagon.” When I had done as he ordered, he said: “Now shut your eyes. Got ’em shut?” Receiving my affirmative answer, he said: “Now you keep your eyes shut and walk in that track for twenty minutes, and you’ll knock out your mosquito brain against the store wall.” Here is an illustration typifying the character of this great man. When assured that in me he had a willing pupil, nothing was too much trouble to explain; and nothing was ever explained unless accompanied by a lesson which could not be forgotten!

He taught me how to bake a damper, how to kill and dress a sheep, how to make horse hobbles, how to ride in the Australian fashion and how to use my fists. He demonstrated that neither bullocks nor mules nor horses understood pure English or pure Chinese but would pull like the devil when addressed with a proper mixture of all the oaths of both nations, topped up, as it were, by the worst oaths favoured by the Afghans.