Death As A Joke

Stories of Australian Miners in New Guinea

By R. W. Robson

ON the New Guinea goldfields mat-mat means “cemetery.”

When that well-known humourist and bookmaker. Jack Harvey, arranged the Mat-mat Double on the Melbourne Cup, the idea caught on tremendously. The Australian in New 7 Guinea is always ready to jeer at death.

One selected a horse in the Melbourne Cup, and coupled it with the name of a man on the goldfield. If the horse won the Cup, and the man was dead by Cup Day, one collected.

It was great fun for the healthy fellows.

They mostly had a bet in which they coupled a Cup favourite with themselves, and the longer the odds the better they were pleased. Then they looked about for a man to put into another bet which they hoped to win.

That was when the men suffering from fever, and ulcers, and rheumatism and so on, began to get annoyed. They were not deceived by tender inquiries about their health; and some of them, on dis covering that they figured prdtninently in Harvey’s book, promptly bought pas sages for the South. They said, in their simple and direct way, that they were not going to make a Roman holiday for any “blankard” who ever shifted beer in Wau.

The consumption of quinine and Aspros doubled.

The men in the Wau hospital were touched by the increase in the number of callers, who asked solicitously about their condition. Some of them, budding hypochondriacs, described their symptoms at length, and were much gratified by the attention they received.

When, a week or two later, it became known in the hospital that the majority of patients had been coupled in the Mat-mat Double with red-hot Cup favourites at very short odds, the hos pital’s temperature charts were thrown out of gear in the most alarming manner.

But a wise doctor diagnosed, not an influenza epidemic, but furious indig nation. He said, afterwards, that the sudden development of the “will to live” among a number of very sick men was really remarkable.

In the hotel bar, one evening, Mr.

Harvey was approached by an old battler whom we shall call Jock Graham. They ordered drinks.

“How much for Silver Standard and me?” asked Jock, as he poured water into his whisky.

Harvey considered him. Silver Standard was “hot,” but Jock looked good for another half-century.

Just as Harvey opened his mouth to say “Hundred to one,” Jock raised his glass. His hand trembled violently. Half the drink went overboard before the glass reached his lips. Fever!

“Fifty to one!” said Harvey.

COME time ago, in an isolated place on the Madang coast, a trader named Brown died. He was a man respected and liked—a “dinkum bloke,” they called him—but the half-dozen white men thereabouts had no time for mourning.

It was blackwater fever, and the burial had to be quick.

Material for a coffin was lacking. They did the best they could with some kero

sene cases, and a couple of odd planks.

Brown had been a very tall man. When they put him in the coffin, his head stuck out over one end. When they pressed his head and feet down inside, his knees doubled up over the top of the shallow box.

They had not the time, nor the material nor the inclination to make a new coffin.

So they cut off the corpse’s head, and placed it between his knees, and thus were able to put the lid on.

I gave a yelp of horror, when they told it to me, and they gazed at me in surprise. ‘Why, he wouldn’t have minded!” they said. ‘‘He’d have understood. He was a bloody good cove!”

They carried the coffin to the grave which the “boys” had dug. There had been heavy rain, and the hole was full of water. The coffin floated on the water.

They put rocks on it —still it would not sink. So they took it out and bored holes in it, and it sank.

“One of the best, old Brown was,” they said, defensively, ONE miserably wet day, I was sitting on the verandah of the Salamaua hotel, when two “boys” came along, push ing a handcart. A long box on the cart had black lap-lap tacked on it; but one end was bare, and bore the legend “Laurel Kerosene.” It was crude, but unmistakeably a coffin.

I remembered, then, that a Mr. Gregory (brother of the well-known Australian M.P.) had died that morning in hospital, after having been brought in from some remote corner of the goldfield suffering from fever. I decided to attend the funeral.

The “boys” wheeled the coffin to the beach, where it was loaded into a boat.

A dozen silent men got into other boats; and we were rowed around a point to the cemetery.

We stood about the open grave, in the pitiless rain, while a District Officer fumbled with an unfamiliar book, and found the burial service.

He read monotonously, for some time, then turned a page. Then he hesitated, turned another page, looked up at the pouring rain, and at the waiting men.

Then he said: “There’s an awful lot of it, boys. Shall I cut out a bit?”

“No, go on, Harry,” they said. “Give him the full issue. He was worth it —he was a real good bloke!”

And so, with proper formality and all in order, they buried another Australian miner. an isolated goldfields settlement, reached only by aeroplane, there came an itinerant dentist.

The miners were glad to see him. Rough kaikai and the foul climate had played the deuce with their teeth.

Three men had their teeth pulled out; and the dentist took impressions, and

promised to send new plates quickly, by post. Six others, with broken or un satisfactory “upper sets,” decided to take the chance of having new plates made.

The dentist completed his job promptly, and posted nine “upper sets” to nine waiting men. The packets lay in a certain store. The storekeeper was a notorious practical joker—one of those men with devilish minds, who ought to be strangled at birth. He deliberately cut off the nine labels, and mixed them up, and re-tied them.

The toothless ones soon guessed what had happened—though they never dis covered the culprit. They simply cursed, and examined the nine dentures hope lessly. But the other miners found a

situation in which their souls rejoiced.

The “gummies” were lined up, and the sets of teeth were passed along the line.

Each man tried each set. It was not exactly hygienic, but some kind of iden tification was established.

All the sets, except one, found an owner. One was rejected, while there were two claimants, each a new-made “gummy,” for another.

They were strong, determined men, but there was no bloodshed. By the grace of God, they were mates, and they got along quite well, for several months, by taking turn about in using the teeth.