The Herald 13 January 1934, page 33
POISON – A Tale of The Nonchalant Bush
Told by Arthur W. Upfield
Once on my way to Ivanhoe, N.S.W., with half a ton of rabbit skins, I called on a selector friend to offer to bring anything he required back from the town. “Thanks,” he said. “Go to Blank and bring me two stone of spuds, three pounds of butter, two of tea and seven of sugar, and half a case each of jam and milk! Oh, and half a pound of strych (strychnine), and a seven-pound tin of cyanide. White strych, remember. Might as well give them foxes strawberry jam as coloured strych. ” Having dispatched the skins to the Sydney market, I called at the general store and collected my friend’s parcel.
It was dark when I reached his house, and he then had the table set for a meal, and the billy simmering over the fire. Being short of sugar, he opened the parcel on the table, and from among the four bottles of strychnine and the tin of cyanide, produced the sugar he required. Later, when he wanted to illustrate a yarn, he used the poison receptacles, his knife and fork, and the salt tin to mark various positions on an imaginary map. We swapped stories that night, with sufficient poison on the table to kill ten thousand rabbits and 8987 human beings— roughly.
As with many laws in this country, those governing the sale of poisons are worthy of the attention of ‘Wodehouse’. If I wish to buy from a chemist sufficient poison with which to kill a sick cat, I have to sign a book and have with me a witness to add his name to mine; but from the bush I can obtain from a country storekeeper or a wholesale house, poison by the pound weight. Yet, despite the easy accessibility to poisons, there are remarkably few accidents among bush people with whom it is of almost daily use.
When employed on State Government vermin fences, and when engaged in trapping. I always had a bottle of strychnine in the tucker box. The strychnine issued by Government Departments is invariably coloured. Once it used to be black, now it is coloured pink. For a reason which I could never ascertain, coloured strychnine is only 20 per cent as efficient as the white crystals. No bush trapper will use coloured strychnine, save to poison the jaws of a dog trap. As my selector friend said, one might as well offer foxes and wild dogs strawberry jam as bait, poisoned with coloured strychnine. Personal observation has convinced me that
if there is a death more dreadful than that caused by strychnine poisoning, I do not wish to hear of it.
Were I some mythical person, invested with unlimited power, I would prohibit the manufacture of strychnine. Of course, vermin must be destroyed. Rabbits may be destroyed with cyanide, which is quick and almost painless, but I have yet to hear of foxes and wild dogs being destroyed with cyanide solution. There is something about it that raises suspicion. It should not be beyond the ability of our chemists to produce a poison as rapid as cyanide and as easily taken by dog and fox as strychnine.
“Take a load of rations out to old Bluenose Harry,” the manager of a Queensland station instructed me one morning, long before the war. Bluenose Harry was an old and cunning dodger, and I found him camped beside a water hole 15 miles from the homestead. It was a cold night, and after a meal we lounged in the warmth of a leaping campfire, when I listened to tales of adventure, one of which has remained in mind. Bluenose told it in language I am unable to produce here. “I got a stiffener of strych once when I was a pimply-faced young feller”, he said. “Me and another lad were helpin to drove sheep down from Wanaaring to the Hills. The boss was an easy kind of bloke, but the cook!!!
His dampers were sods, and his plum duffs was cannon balls.
Me and the other lad was always at him about ‘is sods, and several times he threatened to give us a proper sod wot would make us sick. And one morning, he did sure enough. “We’d camped at a Government dam, and after breakfast we rode off right away to some station sheep yards where we had camped the woollies, having saddled up before breakfast, we was letting the sheep out of the yards when the boss seemed to fall down. “I was looking at him, surprised like, when he seemed to get bigger and bigger. I looks up and everything I seen looked bigger than it our’ter. Me eyes went wonkey, me mouth began to taste worse than a recovery. I wanted to be sick and was sick. And the pain! I sweat, and then I froze. Sometimes the light was so fierce that it hurt me eyes, and then it was so dim that I could ‘ardly see anythink. I see me mate crawling off to the dam, and I’m after him. ‘an the boss coming on behind us and calling at us not to drink if we wanted to live.
As though I wouldn’t have rather died with water in me mouth than live as I felt then. “But he needn’t have worried. None of us reached the water till sundown, and by that time we had got rid of most of the strych we had eaten in the breakfast sod. It was the cook!!!! “How did we get on?”I asked. Bluenose Harry leered like a devil. “We got over it all right, bar the shakes every year in that same month for years after. The cook only gave us enough to make us sick, as he said he would, but he was dead. He took enough strych to kill twenty men.”Again, the old dogger leered. From his tuckerbox, against which he leaned, he took a two-ounce bottle of white strychnine crystals, and, with the point of his knife, abstracted sufficient to well cover a threepenny bit. I saw him lay the poison on his tongue and wash it down his throat with a draft of black tea.
In those days, inexperienced as I was, I harnessed the horse to the dray and drove back to the homestead, where I aroused the manager at four o’clock in the morning, frantically summoning assistance.
“You new-chum ass!” he growled sleepily. “Old Bluenose Harry is a strychnine-eater.*
When you see a man’s hands and his face twitch, you can bet on it.”As far as I know, Bluenose Harry lived forever, but one trapper, Combo William, was really too bad in the manner he handled poisons. He used to carry strychnine loose in a waistcoat pocket, the more easily to secure a pinch with which to bait the remains of a calf killed by wild dogs. When I knew him, there was never a button to the waistcoat, which seemed always to flap violently when he walked or rode. It must have been flapping about one day when he grilled mutton chops over an open campfire, and either he absentmindedly mistook his poison pocket for the salt tin, or some of the crystals fell from it onto the meat. Anyway, Combo William expired. In the bush, we are wickedly careless with poisons, but many of us die only of old age.
*Strychnine has been used historically for both therapeutic and recreational purposes.
Moya Sharp
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