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Phil Jarratt meets Noosa’s favourite cartoonist
At one point in its history, Noosa was so overwhelmed by Melburnians that it was known as “Toorak By The Sea”, but the most colourful of these southern imports, while they may have worked in Melbourne, could trace their free spirits to the tiny beach town of Torquay. More particularly, to a weatherboard shack on the outskirts of town known as Boot Hill.
Among the members of the notorious Boot Hill Gang who made their way to Noosa were
Henry Lees, Ray “Darky” Pettigrove, Bones Murray, Mumbles Walker, Ron Sgro, Brian “Cracker” Coutts, Billy Wardell, Frankie Everett, Peter “Dirts” Davies, Con Fitzsimmons, Frank Johnson and Graham “Knuckles” Wall.
Henry started a bus company, Bones was a plumber, Mumbles a chef for Barry’s On The Beach (Barry Ritter was also from Melbourne), Frank started the Noosa Jazz Festival (with Richard Stevens), Frankie started a gym on Hastings Street, Dirts designed beach house concrete sculptures, Cracker started a palm plantation, Sgroey made millions in real estate and development, and Knuckles became Noosa’s favourite cartoonist.
The herd is thinning now, but Knuckles Wall is still going strong at 84, although a crook back is keeping him off the golf course and the cartoons these days are mostly for his own amusement. But he’s still got a million yarns about the Boot Hill Gang. “I don’t think it’s all that surprising that half the gang ended up in Noosa,” he told Noosa Today. “All we cared about was booze, birds and the beach, and there’s plenty of that here.”
Knuckles joined the Torquay Surf Club in 1956, the year that American lifeguards introduced the Malibu surfboard to Australia while competing at a special Olympic surf carnival hosted by the club. Although he was living in bayside Brighton and freelancing as a graphic artist for Melbourne advertising agencies, Knuckles was soon spending every weekend, summer and winter, camped at Torquay and surfing Bells Beach with neither wetsuit nor leg rope. “If you lost your board, it was a long, cold swim,” he recalls.
After one too many rowdy nights at the camp ground, the nucleus of the Boot Hill Gang pooled their money and bought a block of land far enough away from town for their all-night parties to go unremarked. On it they built a weatherboard party house with a room big enough to fit a seven-piece jazz band at one end and a billiard table for girls to dance on at the other end. Says Knuckles: “Henry said if we don’t have a letterbox we won’t get any bills, so we didn’t. Boot Hill became the venue for some outrageous parties organised by the D’s Club, which stood for dozen. You couldn’t get in unless you brought a dozen ‘tallies’.
“The biggest party we ever had there was for Henry’s 21st. We had 10 barrels but we were still close to running out when the coppers came up and started tucking into the grog, so we made them put the siren on and speed down to the pub and get more beer. Owen Yateman’s jazz band was playing, featuring Frank Johnson, and China Gilbert (club captain) had got all this armour from some theatre company in Melbourne, so we were all dressed in that, and Henry sat on a throne with king’s robes on, drinking from his own personal keg.”
The surf club officially kept a safe distance from the Boot Hill shenanigans, but apart from creating mayhem, the gang actually did a lot of fund-raising for lifesaving equipment.
Meanwhile, Knuckles found time to build a cartooning career in Melbourne, marry Jenny and raise a family, before reuniting with his Boot Hill buddies when he finally moved to Noosa in 1988. A couple of years later he heard that another new arrival and his mates were starting Noosa’s first lifestyle magazine and offered his services as a cartoonist. That was when I first met Knuckles Wall and began a long friendship and a professional partnership based on creative silliness.
For the better part of a decade, Hang Ten O’Hooligan, the surfing layabout, graced the pages of Noosa Blue magazine. Hangie was pretty much like all of Knuckles’ cartoon heroes, going back to Captain Cleancut’s nemesis Filthy Harry McSwine in the 1960s – a debauched and slightly stupid drunk with a heart of gold, which, apart from the stupid bit, is pretty much an apt description of Knuckles himself. (And ouch, I’m going to pay for that.)
Later on, more or less the same bloke popped up on Sunshine Days, a radio serial that played during Knuckles’ jazz program on Noosa Community Radio, except now he was the mayor. Bob Abbot loved it. Mayor Abbot also got a run in The Noosa Dictionary, a little book that Knuckles and I put out, with bearded Bob in his braces addressing the councillors who have matching beards, even the women.
Knuckles reckons Noosa’s too busy these days and he doesn’t come down from his hinterland hideaway very much, but he’s still here, and he’s still laughing at all of life’s silliness. In fact if you’re driving towards Eumundi at beer o’clock, wind down the window and listen. You might just hear a wicked guffaw somewhere around Duke Road.
