Chook Hunter

My paternal grandfather lives on as a cheery, little hardworking gnome of a man in my memory, yet my favourite photo of him, snapped by a street photographer well before my own dad was even born, shows an impossibly roguish little bugger in his prime. An antipodean George Raft wearing his hat cocked at a rakish angle, with hands casually in the pocket of his natty 3-piece suit. He could have been a pint-sized gangster cooly crossing the street on his way to a tommy-gun shoot out, but what he really was, was a professional jockey during the the Great Depression. He cut a dashing figure in what must have been otherwise austere times.

Sometimes, there’s a photo that shows you the other life that an ancestor once had, long before you’d even been thought of, and you realise that your own life may never have happened at all, if that person had done things differently. This is just such a photo, where I for the first time (at the age of 12) saw my pop as a young whip of a man who could have been a hundred things other than my beloved grandfather. Thankfully, the very same photo also explains why I am here at all, for how could Grandma not be dazzled by such a dangerously dashing and dapper little devil.

Years later, by the time of my own adulthood, Pop was almost as wide as he was tall, which wasn’t very. Being a jockey, he only ever came up as far as my adult chin even on his tall days, and his middle had spread with age, despite his restless energy. In my memories of Pop there’s a bustling, happy relentlessness. Even if he’s sitting in a chair he’s busy at some task or other. Yes, he could sit on the verandah and ruminate about this & that, as others in the Baker clan are wont to do, but he’d be just as happy with a chainsaw or axe in hand, whipping a little patch of wayward nature into submission. I saw him prune some well-sized trees into mere nubs over the years for no other reason, that I could see, than industriousness for its own sake. He was as much a force of diminutive & cheerful energy as a nest full of ants.

When not bustling about the place, Pop would sit in a big red plush chair in front of a huge TV set watching the horse races, while simultaneously listening to other races on the radio. When he finally got a colour telly, Pop had the habit of jamming the colour controls all the way up, so that any sporting event became abstracted swatches of primary colour. The raucous combination of dueling TV and radio soundtracks, and clashing moving colours was enough to induce seizures in a more delicate soul, but that’s the way Pop liked it. If I tried to surreptitiously adjust the colour back down to something approximating the real world when he stepped away to the lav, he’d promptly jam the controls back into the fruit salad range when he returned. He didn’t buy a colour telly until late in his life, and to get his money’s worth, by gum, he wanted as much colour as he could possibly get out of the flamin’ thing.

Sadly, I inherited none of my grandfather’s horsemanship. In fact, in my whole life I have sat on a horse only twice. In my own defense, twice is exactly two times more than I’d ever seen Pop on horseback, so there was zero opportunity for his influence. Although his house was full of horse racing paraphernalia, and his framed old photo-finish victories decorated the walls, and he was sure to keep up with the current races themselves, once he retired he never got on horses again. Not that I saw anyway.

He was a constantly cheery and impish presence and it is hard to pin down my earliest memory of Pop, but perhaps it is from when I was 4 years old. We’d travelled from Tasmania, where my immediate family lived in those days, up to the mainland to visit my father’s clan. Pop & Grandma went on to have a veritable army of grandchildren when my then-young aunts & uncles got to breeding, but at this stage most of them still lived in the family home. I remember being endlessly fascinated by the property where they all lived. Sheds full of implements and contraptions from the olden days, a barn with old farm equipment and the remains of of paddocks as yet not built on. It was a fantastic place for a little boy to ramble about in. Back then there was even a rusted and weed-infested old car body to play in (though I know not why, as neither Pop nor Grandma ever drove a car). The buildings were rife with quirky nooks and crannies, like you’d not find in a ’normal’ house unblessed by bush carpentry.

Pop’s house was built in the late 1800s, before his own father (who was long-dead before I was born) bought it to be a place for Pop and he to train horses, just outside the town. In that bush tradition whereby the acquisition of a new tool just meant walloping a new nail in the wall to hang it on, and you thumped and banged things together yourself, they expanded the place. My own dad helped improve the house by his own hand even further, in his youth. Eventually though, their land was swallowed up by the expansion of the town, and the rise in council rates prompted them to sell off most of their land. When it was resold and broken up into suburban lots, Grandma & Pop had the most ancient & ramshackle house on the South Hill neighbourhood of my hometown, with only a nearby street named ’Baker Place’ to mark all that they once had.

Needless to say I was fascinated by this place at the age of 4, but more than that, I was drawn to Pop himself;  his chipper energy and jokey way of talking, with turns-of-phrase from an earlier time. So, while everyone else was inside the house nattering, and drinking tea, Pop busied himself in the shed or stables, while being dogged by 4-year-old me. As diminutively relentless as himself in my own way, I was a never-ceasing chatterbox. I probably wore him out with endless questions about this and queries about that, not to mention getting under-foot. His always-jovial banter started to crack a little when he wanted to get on with his work, which was bound to be physical.

Pop pulls my leg

Decades later, on a trip home to Australia when I stayed with Pop, he proclaimed his simple philosophy that it wasn’t really ’work’ if you sat on your arse to do it. This was cheerfully offered up to his chair-bound animator grandson without even a hint of scorn (well, maybe just a little). Even without jetlag I can sleep quite late, but with it, Pop is likely to have done a day’s industry – pruning trees, mowing the lawn and riding his bicycle to the town TAB and back – before I’d even even gotten out of bed. “Ooh, here he is, ’the Sultan’ is risen!” he chirped with a mock curtsy, as I ambled into the kitchen, sometime after noon. Thus needled, I chopped him some wood to prove my mettle, and the axe swung erratically this way and that with much huffing and puffing for such a mediocre pile of wood chips that I had to laugh. Accompanied by gales of leprechaun giggles from old Pop. Anyway, I was telling you of a littler, 4 year old me, pestering a much-younger Pop at his work many years earlier:

While following Pop about the place, I had expressed a 4 year old’s fascination with the chickens wandering at their leisure and pecking throughout the yard. With a tour de force of misdirection that would’ve done Tom Sawyer proud, Pop saw a way to lose his tiny escort.. and cooked up a deal, promising that if I could catch one of his chickens, I’d be welcome to take it home to Tasmania. Well, this enticing offer did not have to be made twice, for what 4 year old boy can resist the allure of his very own personal chicken? And so, I was off. Pop must have cheerfully congratulated himself for the genius of his ruse, as I was so engrossed in chook-chasing that he had ample time to finish all his errands unmolested any further by my quizzing. Pop went into the house for a cup of tea and wait for my 4 year old’s batteries to inevitably run down, long before any of his chooks were nabbed by my little stumpy-legged self.

Pulling someone’s leg is a national pastime in Australia, but what separates a good piss-take from the more common but subpar article is not just the quality of wit itself but a show of genuine affection and a commiserating sense that we are all united in our ridiculousness. Pop was the sort of bloke who could disagree with your philosophy with such a twinkle of his eye that you’d laugh at yourself and him too. Being led to a good-natured chuckle at one’s own expense is a true gift, and the reason Pop could do it so well was his keen sense of his own foibles. For example, Pop loved to tell with, a gleeful giggle, how wrong he was about Phar Lap, who Pop once rode on that later-famous horse’s first win. It was to be the first win of many, at any distance. So, when Pop had opined that Phar Lap “wouldn’t stay“, a more hilariously inaccurate prediction by a young jockey was never made. Which brings me back to how Pop also misjudged me as a 4 year old boy. Because far from losing interest in his chooks, I went after them like a tiny heat-seeking missile.

chasing the chooks

Here’s the thing I learned on that long-ago day; don’t chase the flock, chase the chook. You don’t go after the brown one and then change your mind mid-stream and chase the black one, willy nilly. What an expert chook-chaser does is focus. It took me much trial and error to figure that out, but I give you the hard-won advice now for free; just badger one particular chook till it snaps.

Eventually, I target-locked my sights on a splendid white chook. She gave me a merry tour of the yard; round and round, to and fro, into and out of the sheds and barns, and I fell on my face more than once.. But I became that chicken’s own personal Ring Wraith, committed to pursuing her into the next world if needs be. We all know very well that there is nothing so relentless as a 4 year old boy with an obsession, so without an ice cream cone to distract me with, that chook was done for. She dashed this way and that, as I harried her around the place, but when she realised this fact for herself, she stopped her mad dash and froze, cringing before me, the way a chook will do when its mental circuitry has popped a fuse. For if a chook has a weakest link, it would have to be its brain.

When I finally, triumphantly, picked up that plump, white, brain-frozen bird, she was almost as big as tiny, 4 year old me. I felt like the mighty hunter as, proudly, I strode into the kitchen where all the Baker clan were enjoying themselves, smoking, drinking their tea and eating their biscuits. I announced to Pop that I’d caught my chook and was looking forward to taking her home to Tasmania with me, to the great hilarity of everyone present. Pop too burst out laughing, admitting that he’d never thought in a million years that I would actually catch one of those chickens, and had not thought what to do if I did. But now his cunning Tom Sawyer shtick had come home to roost and I wanted my chook.

A splendid white CHOOK

Eventually, it was made clear to me that Pop had been joking. I was devastated, as only a little boy can be. The logistical impossibility of transporting a terrified chicken across 3 states in our tiny and already over-stuffed Toyota Corolla was explained, and a plate of biccies was given to the thwarted (and pouty) big game hunter as a consolation prize. In subsequent years, Pop himself told this story many times with great hilarity, and genuine admiration that I relentlessly bagged that chook at the age of 4 and, in the end, Pop’s undeniable pleasure at how I called his bluff and proved him wrong was all the consolation prize I really needed.

——-

Though descended from a few flavours of whitey, I’m more Irish than anything else. The theme of my ancestry is that everyone married an Irish girl. The German (Pop’s Dad) married an Irish girl, the Scotsman married an Irish girl, the Englishman married an Irish girl and so indeed did the Irishman. Moody Irish souls, given to dark thinking, roost in both branches of my family-tree, and I feel within myself the potential for destruction in the unchecked morose spirit. But my Pop, Irish on his mother’s side, represents the other Irish stereotype; the cheerful, twinkly eyed, laugh-in-the-face-of-your-problems kind. Or perhaps it was the jolly German in him responsible for these qualities I so fondly remember? In the end, it’s most accurate to say that dear Pop himself was this irrepressible spirit, and I was lucky to have his early example.

It’s said that “a well-balanced Australian has a chip on each shoulder” but my Pop was as well-balanced a man as I’ve ever known, Australian or otherwise, yet had no chips at all, that I could see, even though the hard circumstance of his life could easily have put them there. As with any of his other chores, he industriously brushed them aside and got on with living his life with a playful sense of humour, which is the best survival mechanism there is (and the more serious your situation, the more healing humour becomes, I have found).

So, I am both blessed and grateful, that the tiny, dapper devil of that long-ago street photograph, instead of doing other things, married a particular Irish girl and, unlike the parent who abandoned him in his own childhood, stayed around to enrich the lives of the children he had with her, and the lives of all his many grandchildren, of which I am one.

Jack Baker
1911-2000

my grandfather, 1990.

36 thoughts on “Chook Hunter”

  1. I would have worshipped your Pop when I was a kid. I wanted to be a jockey when I was young after having seen the Black Stallion… I thought that was the most exciting job on the planet. And to know your Pop rode one of the most famous race horses too! Wow!

    I love your drawing of little Jamie holding the chook. :) Too cute! I bet that is what you looked like too bringing him in. Hilarious!

    xxxxxx

    Reply
  2. Ahhh yes… haven’t folks figured out yet that there’s nothing like throwing a challenge at a kid to get them to focus on something!
    And rest assured, your Pop wasn’t the first jockey, trainer or owner to get things wrong when it comes to predicting a animals ability … and definitely wasn’t the last! (lol) The damn things have a habit of making fools of all of us!
    I still have my framed print of Phar Lap that your Pop autographed for me! :)

    Reply
  3. I wish I had learned the value of focus in chook chasing at this early age. That’s why life’s chooks continue to take the piss out of me. :) Thanks for the Aussie language lessons. This is as vivd as the color on your dad’s tv set, and the drawings are great as usual. :)

    Reply
  4. I remember my dad, who in his later years was called Pop, talking about your Pop.
    My dad was always a one horse trainer. I have many memories of him selecting, buying, breaking in, riding track work , shoeing, feeding, saddling, grooming his horses. He would never teach us to ride, cause he didn’t won’t his daughters having broad arses! He did pass on some skills with numbers as I use to sit next to him when he was a penciller for a bookie on Saturdays and going to do the settling up on Sundays after church, followed by a visited to the stables. James your article has bought back many memories for me.

    Reply
  5. Truly truly wonderful on so many levels ‘personal Ring Wraith’! :) Even though, I’d heard about your grandpa before, it wasn’t like this. Well done once again Mr. Baker! Awesome drawings especially the chook hunter with his prize!

    Reply
    • Glad you liked it, Rhode! I had fun writing this remembrance of my Pop. And I enjoyed doing the drawings too. I’m still never sure what my left hand will do, but it is fun finding out.

  6. I have many memories of taking tea cakes to Pop with your Dad and the boys. Even after his stroke, he was such a spinning top of energy!! Love that house, too. So glad I got to know him!

    Reply
    • Actually it was just Tyler that met Pop, now that I think of it! Pop died the week I had Jack which is how he got his name! :)

    • Thank you, Joy.

      Yes, I first knew Pop as a cheeky little leprechaun smartypants jokester, but all the photo evidence says that he was a dashing little debonair devil in his prime.

  7. Wow, the force is strong in this Hen Solo tale! A wonderful account JB, full of wit, insight and memorable one-liners. This tale brings history alive and perhaps reminds us, be it in subtle or pronounced ways, we are part of what came before. The drawings are superb, especially the last one. And, really enjoyed the comments by Baci & Simmo. JD

    Reply
    • Ha! “HEN Solo”! Well done! I love me a good pun!

      I wrote this almost 10 years ago when I was still very much wrestling with the aftershocks of my stroke. Back then it was all I could do to agonise over ONE drawing with my left hand – the one of teensy me holding the chook. I’d scribbled out ideas for the others, but I’d not yet mastered how to use photoshop with one hand, so I left 3 of them off till just a few years back, 2021, when I’d gotten better at using a computer. Then I coloured & added the remaining sketches to this yarn. I’m glad you liked the last image. I knew I couldn’t pull off the multilayered focus in 2013, and glad that I could finally do the idea justice.

      Yes, Baci & Simmo had a few good things to add here, both coming from Armidale horse folk too. I loved hearing what they had to say too.

      Thanks again for reading & commenting JD!

  8. Thanks Jamie. Pop feels as dreamily real to me as people in my own family history, and you’re writing is so familiar and vivid, even ‘handshake vivid’. I feel introduced to Pop and the rest of your crew. Plus I was watching a documentary about making THE AFRICAN QUEEN and I swear your drawings are framed like a cinematographer. Good on you & Pop!

    Reply
  9. Jamie! As always, your lovely tales (beautifully hilariously illustrated!) are rides on magic carpets woven out of wit and observation. Not to get all mystical, but it honors the ancestors when we talk about who they were and what they did, adventurous citizens of a distant time. Thanks! (GE)

    Reply

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.