Rice and a Wild Goose Chase

Once it became known that the magpie geese might be a problem on the Humpty Doo rice fields, all sorts of ideas were put forward and all kinds of remedies were tried in the hope that the birds could be kept away. Scaring the birds with flashing lights, metal strips, searchlights, firecrackers and even gunfire were tried, to no avail. The Army was called in with machine guns, but that didn’t frighten the birds either.

The Top Ends poet laureate, Bill Armbrust, thought that he had the answer – bagpipes. His poem “A Wild Goose Chase” was published in the NT News on 12 April 1956. In part, it read –

I was drinking up in Darwin
With a friend the other day,
And I told him if they’d let me try,
I could hunt the geese away.

Bagpipe music – that’s the answer,
Play it good old Highland style;
Shoo them off with bold “Loch Lomond”
And with “Mary of Argyle” –

Bring a piper out from Scotland,
Have him play his sweet refrain,
And the geese will leave in thousands,
And they’ll ne’er come back again.

Yet the scheme might have its drawbacks,
Though ‘twould be a certain cure,
Like all untried experiments,
One never can be too sure.

While the piper kept on piping,
And the geese were going through,
The farmer and his wife and kids
Might leave the ricefields too.

Bill had come to the Territory soon after the war. He bought a truck and carted firewood and freight around Darwin, and down the track to Alice Springs. Later, Bill worked at Rum Jungle.

Punting and poetry were Bill’s first loves. He was a small time SP bookmaker, and, much more successfully and memorably, he wrote poetic commentary on the events of the day.

Alas, Bill moved back to his native Queensland in the early 1960s. But the magpie geese stayed on.