Francis Humphris Brown

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Scotty's Wild Stuff Stoo

The cause of all the trouble
Was McCabe, the jackeroo,
Who had ordered what, facetiously,
He’d christened “Wild Stuff Stew”
He had shot a brace of pigeons
And had brought them home unplucked;
It was not the first occasion,
And no wonder Scotty bucked
As aside he threw the pigeons
And addressed the jackeroo:
“Ye’ll pluck those blinded pigeons,
Or ye’ll get no blinded stoo.”
But the jackeroo objected,
And objected strongly, too.
But Scotty didn’t argue much,
He winked across at Blue
And, turning to the slushy, said,
“I’ll give him ‘Wild Stuff Stoo’.”
The next day it was Sunday, and,
Not having much to do,
We all assisted Scotty
In the making of a stoo.

We raked along the wool-sheds,
In the pens and round about –
It was marvellous, all the wild things
That us rousies fossicked out;
There was Ginger found a lizard,
Which they reckoned was a Jew –
It was rather rough to handle,
But it softened in the stew;
Then Snowy found some hairy things
Inside a musterer’s tent;
And Splinter found a lady frog –
And in the lady went.
From McGregor, who’d been foxing,
We obtained a skin or two,
It should have gone to bootlace
But it went into the stoo.
Then someone found a “Kelly”
That the boundary-rider shot –
It was more or less fermented,
Still, it went inside the pot;
And Scotty found some insects
With an overpowering scent,
And the slushy trapped a mother mouse –
And in poor mother went.

There was some hesitation
’bout a spider in a tin:
We didn’t like the small red spot,
But Scotty dumped it in.
There were a host of other things
- I can’t recall the lot –
That were cast into eternity
Per medium of the pot.
Those strange and weird concoctions
That the Abos sometimes brew
Would be as mild potations
If compared with Scotty’s stew . . .
And when the jackeroo arrived
A happy man was he
To find that Scotty, after all,
Had cooked a stoo for tea.
He rolled his eyes, and snuffed the fumes,
’twas dinkum stuff he swore;
He complimented Scotty, and
He passed his plate for more.
And when we’d let him have his fill,
We took him round to view
A list of what had left this world
To enter Scotty’s stew.

I grant you there were wild things
Connected with that stoo,
But there was nothing wilder
Than McCabe the jackeroo.
He got the dries and then the shakes,
And we felt shaky too;
We were thinking of the spider
With the red spot in the stoo.
We rushed him to the homestead,
They told him there ’twas flu,
But us rousies, we knew better –
It was Scotty’s “Wild Stuff Stoo”.

But Scotty isn’t cooking now,
For Scotty is long dead;
They say he turned it in through booze
At Thurlagoona shed;
And away across the border
There’s a certain jackeroo,
Who for years has never tasted
What he christened “Wild Stuff Stoo”.

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