Follow My Dust!
A biography of
ARTHUR UPFIELD
By Jessica Hawke
With an introduction by
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
ETT IMPRINT, SYDNEY
ETT IMPRINT
PO Box R1906
Royal Exchange NSW 1225
Australia
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes
of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written
permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
First published by William Heinemann 1957
This edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2015
Copyright © Don Uren, 2015
ISBN 978-1-925416-10-7 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-875892-92-1 (ebook)
CONTENTS
An Introduction
1 The Man to Be
2 Off to Gaol
3 Signing Rent Books
4 Where All are Bastards
5 One Spur Dick
6 The Red Irishman
7 Wandering Millie
8 ‘Wire Five Quid!’
9 The Amateur Bull-Fighter
10 Hen-House Brew
11 It in Satin Pants
12 The Debonair Murderer
13 A Lamb in the Jungle
ILLUSTRATIONS
The author with Arthur Upfield
A monarch iguana
A chain of caterpillars
A tame kangaroo
Wild dog puppies looking for their mother
An aboriginal lady
Blackfellow’s letter-stick
A sandhill: the background of Death of a Swagman
The sandhill has blown across the track since the utility was last this way
Upfield at his desk
The dray from the rear, where Upfield wrote The Sands of Windee
The Brooking Range, East Kimberley: the background for Cake in the Hat Box
The Wolf Creek meteorite crater, described in Cake in the Hat Box
Upfield at the time he met the original of ‘Bony’
Upfield with Mr. James L Hole in 1950
The rain-shed where Rowles and Ritchie found Ryan and Lloyd
John Thomas Smith, alias Snowy Rowles
The residue of the fires which consumed the body of Carron
ARTHUR W. UPFIELD
HIS EPITAPH TO BE
_____
A boy: every wind blew fair.
A youth: he mutinied.
A young man: he wrecked the ship.
Then he built another.
AN INTRODUCTION
I am able clearly to recall my first meeting with Arthur Upfield. It came about when I was myself embattled with forces tending to push me down to the nomadic existence and mental outlook of my mother’s people, for, you should know, my mother was an aborigine and my father was a white Australian. I knew neither parent, and, when a small baby, had been found with my dead mother beneath a sandalwood tree, and was cared for and reared by the Mission Matron. To her I owe a first-class education, and the eradication of an inferiority complex threatened by duality of race.
I had engaged sporadically in police work, and had taken employment as a stockman on a station in the south-west of Queensland, when Arthur Upfield was brought to my hut to work with me. I was not at the hut when Upfield arrived, and I found him baking a brownie and cooking dinner. In the kitchen, we stood either side the table and took stock of each other.
He was of my own age–thirty. He was dressed as any stockman of that time dressed. He was tall, lean, hard. Brown hair grew a little low on his forehead, which was narrow, and the back of his head was broader and higher than the face, indicating a minus concentration and a plus imagination; and, I observed, his ears were fawn-like, denoting quick thinking, and his mouth was mobile and hinted at a sense of humour. About the chin there was a trace of sensuality and arrogance.
His smile of welcome was swift, the smile lighting his hazel eyes, and any reserve I may have had was banished by the outstretched hand and the warmth of its clasp. He spoke rapidly, and when animated was inclined to slur his words. Absence of reserve in him overcame my own, and, when we sat down to his dinner of curry and rice and stewed apricots, I found myself answering a barrage of questions. Should the answer of necessity be prolonged by detail, quite often he would not be listening, so anxious was he to put his next question. Many of his questions were of so personal a nature that I had to evade them until much later when I came to know him better.
As a horseman he passed, but without honours. He had much to learn as a cattleman, but then cattlemen are born, and southern England doesn’t produce cattlemen. By white stockmen standards he could read tracks passably well; he could cook above average, and he liked poker, which I never did. What commended him chiefly to me was his thirst for knowledge. He never attempted to impress me, and never betrayed a hint of superiority over me.
Thus within a week I informed him on matters I would not speak of to any of a hundred other men. It was almost a pleasure to tell him that my registered name is Leon Wood. The subject of the aborigines, the totemic structure of their society, the powers of their magic men, their letter-sticks and smoke signals, he returned to time and time again. Having watched together a migration of rabbits, his questioning concerning these rodents, as well as the migration of rats and mice farther north, became almost embarrassing by its persistence.
I was compelled to acknowledge slight bafflement to myself. Here was a man seeking information and obviously assimilating it, and yet the standard of his education was much lower than my own–but not on all points. A probe now and then proved that he knew very little of algebra, nothing of the higher mathematics, very little of Latin, and was entirely ignorant of Greek. He had me on English history, and on the first great voyages.
We were five months together, and his companionship did much to bring about certain decisions I was able to make relative to my own future. Neither of us was at all put out when the station reorganised its manpower, and we left to travel together for a few miles before parting.
Shortly after this, I received a special appointment within the Queensland Police Department, and years later an assignment took me into western New South Wales, and to my second meeting with Arthur Upfield. He was now working as cook at a place called Wheeler’s Well, but when I visited there he had no one for whom to cook, and I wondered how he endured this loneliness, as he seemed