ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

Why is the billy black?

Stephen Whiteside 28.11.2012

Why is the billy black?

Perhaps, you might say, the reason it's black
Is due to the life it has led on the track;
So often it's stood in the camp fire's flames,
Obedient servant in all of the games
Of the drovers and shearers and men of the land
Who've neither the cash nor the space for a grand
Contraption of metal to cook them their tea...
And it helps to convince them they're footloose and free.

Is that why it's black?

The flames carry soot from the roughly tossed wood.
They have blackened the billy wherever it stood.
So why's it not washed when the drover hits town;
Sudded and scoured, stripped thoroughly down
Till it gleams like the day it was bought from the store?
It's a symbol of freedom? Is that what it's for?
An icon of all that is life in the bush,
As opposed to the squeeze of the mean city push?

Is that why it's black?

Perhaps it was not even purchased at all,
Or so long ago now that none can recall.
It's owned by Big Mickey, who got it from Blue,
Who got it from...got it from...no one knows who...
The cattle have gone now, the horses as well;
The men, and their swags, they have all gone to hell;
A ghostly parade of anonymous lives,
Yet the billy, black billy, black billy survives.

Is that why the billy's black?

I believe you can now buy new billies with cosmetic blackening, Marty.

What about the inside of the billy, Marty? I know of a bloke who refused to clean his porridge billy.

Fair enough. I must admit, I tend to commit the sacrilegious sin of cleaning my billies. The difficulty is that I put them inside my pack, and they make everything else filthy if they are covered in soot. If I don't put them inside the pack when we go bushwalking, they catch on all the undergrowth. (We lost one that way once, but returned to the same hut eighteen months later to find somebody had found it lying in the nearby bush, and put it on the table!) They also make a hell of a racket when you're walking if they're tied on the outside.

When he was younger, my son used to be digusted with me for cleaning the billies, but then, he didn't do any of the cleaning up afterwards, did he?

Marty, you sound a bit like the tourist blokes (and sheilas) who we see driving around the centre in shiny 4WDs with mud all over them...when it hasn't rained for six months! I have heard that they put it there on purpose....got me baffled.
I did see a tourist driving a little Suzuki outside the white posts alongside a perfectly good bitumen road down by Kings Canyon once, he had been doing it for a fair while too by the look of the tracks I had been following. I guess having a black billy or a muddy car makes people feel like they are a bushy....even if they are not!.... Actually Stephen, I wash the outside of my billy too for the same reason you do, not that I use one much these days.

Maybe the 'Blackened Billy Bush Verse Competition' should be re-named the 'Shiny Billy', Ross!

Interesting remarks. What does a bushman do who lives on the track with a mob

By the creek or water hole, dam or bore, grabs a billy of water moves back from the edge and scrapes a depression tips water into the hole in the dirt and rubs the mud around the outside of his billy or quart pot if you wish to call it that and your camp oven to remove the black carbon including the inside to remove the left over contents then rinse the lot once again and put it back in your kit
that way your cloths don't get so dirty and stay cleaner

bill the old battler

Makes me realize what a slack bloke I must be, my billy usually has a thick coating of carbon on the outside, although I do keep the inside clean except for the discolouring caused by making tea in it. These days of course with tea bags there's no need for even that.
But every now and again I still chuck a few tea leaves in the billy and make a proper mug of tea.

But like Ross I don't use it that often now-a-days.

Terry

... agree Bill, mud and gravel work a treat, then a quick rise out with running creek water (if that's where you are) ...

So it seems the billy really isn't black after all? Must dash an email off to the Tamworth Poetry Reading Group...