A LITTLE BIT
OF GUNPLAY
Spinifex deals us in
"Well show us your cards!" Boof slammed down his hand, reached up the back of his belt and looked fairly threatening.
Sixty years ago I might have been worried. There were plenty of blokes then who'd lay a pistol on the table at the start of a game here in the Creek and be prepared to use it if it became just a little bit fussy. He might have been reaching for a shooting iron but I knew he was really just wanting a bit of a scratch. It was easy now.
"Look, you great dill, four Aces, two Kings and a string of nines is going to win it every time."
We were playing five hundred - how old is that game anyway - and he'd just lost his call and was on the way to having to buy the next Bin 707 for the troops.
"What do you want?" I sneered. ""Bill Stanner to adjudicate? Watch over the game so you blouses can play with the men?"
"What, the first real copper in the town?" he shot back. Reading history again, I thought. Knows about old Bill. He went on. Tipping back the last of the fine Sauvignon I'd had to fix up for my partners ambitious eight hearts.
"The bloke with the couple of savage dogs, who lived in a tent and who all of a sudden pulled the place into line?" Into a rant again.
"No, that's not him. Hard man though. The second bloke bloke came down with a bit of a real hard name" We all knew about him around the table, the bloke who'd been brought into the Creek in 1934 after a pretty strident call from the general community. He'd had a bit of a background when he arrived but it didn't matter much back then. Just added to the reputation.
The second man appointed to the Force in Tennant Creek was Mounted Constable Gordon Stott. It was reported in the Melbourne Herald of October 3 1934. It came after the fatal shooting of the miner Mick O'Brien. The second police officer placed here.
"Wasn't he the bloke..?"
"Yup. From Borroloola." He had a bit of a name and they wanted that on the fields. Time to sweeten the place up a bit. Getting just a little too rough and tough. The government wanted gold and prosperity, not Dodge City and Boot Hill. Stott was the Constable who had been recently acquitted on a charge of 'having assaulted a lubra and a native boy at Borroloola. The lubra subsequently died.'
"Did they really need it?" he wanted to know.
"Hell yeah. It was rough. There'd just been a killing, there'd been gunplay in the streets and in the hills about claimjumping and rival gangs were getting around and that sensationalist journalist Ion Iddriess was writing about the Wild West in Tennant's Creek and the government just didn't want it."
"So they put a couple of hard wallopers in?"
And they were hard wallopers. Guns and vicious dogs and some pretty rough justice to boot. There were people wanting to have a go at losing all they had, there were some pretty good strikes going down, some real real good crushings, some running to five or ten ounces a ton and no government wanted gunplay and lawlessness about the place. Not when somewhere was producing revenue and that somewhere was Tennant's Creek and there was a gut-wrenching depression on and this place just might pull here and Australia out of the economic bullshit that was happening.
"What about Al McDonald?" Boof wanted to know.
"The Maori pug who had his arse shot away?"
"Yeah, him."
A famous story. He used to grubstake miners, give them a couple of hundred, get them pissed and then follow 'em out the back. Give them a hell of a hiding, pinch his stake back from their pockets except for a few quid and lay some real heavies on them next day. Bit of a nasty bastard. Double bite on a few strugglers who didn't need it.
"Got him though, didn't they? Blew his arse off?"
"Yeah, someone sussed him, wasn't pissed when he went out the back for a leak and let him have some small gauge shotgun into his sitting-down furniture. They were picking it out for months later. He never grubstaked another mine, the story goes." Copper justice, natural justice. What goes round comes round.
He laid out the Bird, three Aces, three Kings and a couple of Queens. And two bowers. "Your shout!" he crowed.
I looked around the table for the small gauge but couldn't see it. It was here just here a moment ago. Maybe Mounted Constable Stott had cleared it away years before.