SUBMITTED BY CLIVE BALL
Roy's father bought his first car, a Model T Ford, in the 1920s. In those days, goanna oil was sometimes used as a liniment. His father delighted in telling the bush yarn about a man who, running short of oil for his Model T, used goanna oil instead. When the car was started it would run to the nearest tree and try to climb it!
T up a Tree, or Goanna Oil, by Roy Wheeler.
On Mt Majura’s lower slopes, beside the limestone plain,
Are tall and graceful eucalypts, where noisy magpies reign.
And in some upper branches is the strangest sight to see –
The engine and the chassis of an ancient Model T.
Just how the car got up there is a story yet untold
But if you care to listen, now the mystery will unfold:
It was during the Depression that a bloke called Battler Bill
Was camped on Mt Majura with his eucalyptus still.
Now Bill he had a Model T, “Tin Lizzies” they were called;
The engine knocked and rattled, the tyres were old and bald,
The tank was almost empty and the engine short of oil,
For poor old Bill was stony broke in spite of all his toil.
One night he sat beside his fire and ate some rabbit stew.
His tattered coat and trousers let the wintry wind blow through.
He crawled into his flapping tent, but creeping up outside,
A ten-foot-long goanna tried the stew – and promptly died!
Next morning while he waited for his billy tea to brew
Bill thought about goanna oil and what that oil could do:
A certain cure for aches and pains, arthritis, sandy blight –
A gallon in the Model T would surely be all right.
Bill chopped the big goanna up, soon had it on the boil;
Within an hour the old bush still produced goanna oil.
He poured the oil into the sump, which filled to overflowing,
Then turned the switch and swung the crank and got the old car going.
The engine roared, the mudguards shook, the horn let out a croak;
With spinning wheels, the car ran off, the camp was lost in smoke.
It steered itself towards a tree, Bill felt his spirits sinking,
And watched it scramble up the trunk with both its headlamps blinking.
It stopped and settled in a fork, high up above the ground,
And there it stayed these many years while seasons rolled around.
And one by one the bits fell off to rust away below
The chassis and the engine held and never did let go.
And when a gentle summer breeze blows softly ’cross the plain
It lifts the gum tree's branches up and lets them down again.
Goannas stop to listen, stock still on tree and stump –
They hear their dear old Grandad as he sloshes in the sump!
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