Illywhacker Read Online Free PDF

happy. What he liked to do was talk. And when the house was empty of guests he’d put on his hat and walk three miles down to Corio Quay where he could still find, in 1919, bullock wagons unloading wool. He could yarn with the bullockies for hours. They talkedrecord hauls. They boasted. Jack told them how he’d got the boiler into Point’s Point in 1910. He advised them to move into trucks. He spoke enthusiastically about the future of the automobile but he looked with envy on their teams: Redman, Tiger, Lofty, Yallarman, he knew the beasts almost as well as he knew the men. He shouted them “Gentleman’s grog” and, in his cups, made plans to go back on the track. When Lauchie Barr’s team brought thirty-two tons of bagged wheat in from Colac and broke the Australian record, Jack brought him to dinner and presented him with a handsome cup with a silver cricketer standing on its lid.
    He was exactly the sort of man I had wished to land on: enthusiastic, willing, and impressed with the idea of an aeroplane. But when I saw him stride across the road in his expensive suit I didn’t realize what was coming. I saw a rich man. I was never good with rich men. They made my hackles rise.
    This false impression didn’t last a minute. Jack whipped off his jacket and ripped off his tie. He lost his collar studs in the grass. He collected his cufflinks and rolled up his sleeves while his wife, a pretty ginger cat in fluffy white, watched from the safety of the road.
    To get the craft into O’Hagen’s it was necessary to remove a few fence posts. Jack picked up a crowbar and set to it like a fellow who is starved of work. He raised the crowbar and sank it into the red earth. “That’s the go,” he said.
“That’s
the go.” He did not mean to overpower Ernest Vogelnest or snatch tools from his hand. He was being polite, useful, and although he was bursting with curiosity about the plane, he did not say a word that could be considered nosey. He gave himself wholly to the task at hand, to remove those four posts, replace them, get the plane through O’Hagen’s broken fence, and hide it behind the hall.
    The posts were out in a moment. Jack stacked them neatly and then I explained to them where they could push or lift and where they couldn’t. You have to be careful with a plane like a Farman—you lift under a strut, never between. When I was sure they understood the requirements, I ordered a start, but although the farmer was quick to get his back under a strut, Jack McGrath would not have a bar of it.
    It was all very well, he said, to rush into digging out a fence or putting one back in, but only a fool rushed into pushing anything, whether it was a dray or an auto or an aeroplane, without first looking over the ground and assessing the problems. He knew this from all his years with bullock teams. The secret of his successhad not just been, as everyone thought, that he knew his beasts, each individual, like you might know a man or woman, each one with their strengths, their weaknesses, their little quirks. His success had been sealed on all the nights he had gone to sleep thinking out a problem. The way he got that boiler into Point’s Point is the most famous example, but he would approach a difficult log in the same way. His success had been in thinking it out, and often when he met someone on the track, bogged to the axles under ten tons of wool, or in trouble on a pinch, he would see that they were only in strife because they had not stopped long enough to think. So at Balliang East he walked with me over to O’Hagen’s, and unearthed a nasty hollow and a tangle of barbed wire which had been hidden in the dry summer grass.
    When we had cleared the wire away, we came back across the road to the craft and, seeing the daughter occupied the front cockpit, I enquired whether the mother might not like a ride in the back.
    Jack was surprised to see her accept—she was always so nervous—but he didn’t reckon on my