Journey to the Stone Country (3 page)

Annabelle put on her glasses and opened the report. She squinted at the print trembling and dancing in front of her eyes:
Before the conquest by the white man, all of Australia was land owned under
Aboriginal terms by Aboriginal people. Within this context, the Birri Gubba
people were and still are the traditional owners to the area bounded (in proximity)
by Ross River in Townsville, the Valley of Lagoons north of Charters Towers, the
Great Dividing Range west of Pentland, the Great Dividing Range being our
western boundary, down to Alpha, across to Emerald, across to the junction of the
Mackenzie and Dawson Rivers and across to Marlborough north of Rockhampton.
The Birri Gubba people have never conceded ownership of this land to the white
man. This land is still ours and will remain ours for all time.

She closed the report and took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. It was too difficult to read with the Pajero jumping around. She needed a cup of coffee.

Susan was yelling into her mobile, arranging the rendezvous with the Indigenous cultural officer and the mine representative. Susan shoved the mobile back into the chest pocket of her overalls. ‘I’m way behind schedule. I promised to have this job done six months ago. I’ve got too much work coming in. That’s the trouble.’ She counted on her fingers. ‘There’s six surveys, not including this one, either part done or not even started yet. You saw the mess back in the office.’ She nodded at the report on Annabelle’s knees. ‘What d’you think of that? Don’t tell me. It’s a load of crap. I know. God, I must sound cynical to you. I need a rest, Annie.’ She waved at the interior of the Pajero. ‘From all this. I need to pull back a step or two from black politics and white greed and take another look at little old me. I’m fifty this year.’ She tucked the speeding Pajero in perilously close behind a caravan, watching for her chance to pass. ‘Come on! Come on!’ she murmured. ‘Let’s go!’

They reached the place of rendezvous at three o’clock in the afternoon. A clearing in the brigalow scrub twenty kilometres beyond the mine entrance at the end of a fresh bulldozer scrape. Two men stood talking beside a green four-wheel drive, the white and gold mine insignia on its doorpanel. A white Ford truck parked a short way off in the thin shade of a stand of sandalwood trees. Two people sitting in the cabin. The windows wound up. Their faces impassive behind the screen reflecting sky and trees.

The two men talking by the mine vehicle turned and watched the Pajero drive up. One was wearing a white hardhat with an empty lampclip, a site ID clipped to the pocket of his shirt. As he turned to watch them come up the plastic site ID caught the sun. The other man wore a pale cowboy hat set back on his head, a stripy shirt and blue jeans, his pointy-toed riding boots turned over at the heels. Annabelle recognised in him the style of man who had worked for her father; the itinerant stockmen who stayed a season, mustering the scrubs then rode out with a polite goodbye and were not seen again, or who maybe reappeared a year or two later to muster the scrubs again, greeting you as if they had not been away and no time had passed. Independent, gracious and modest horsemen. Silent for the most part. Respecting the mysterious ways of the scrub cattle. Going about their business, then leaving with their cheque when they were done. Leaving you with the impression that although they were hired hands they worked for themselves, seeking some higher purpose of the brotherhood to which they belonged and acknowledging their equals only in each other. Annabelle smiled to see him. ‘A Queensland ringer,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen one of them for a long time.’

‘Yeah. They’re getting to be a scarce breed up this way too,’ Susan said. ‘He’s a good man. We’ve done a lot of work together. Some of these so-called cultural officers they send up have never been in the bush. I’ve had them ask me if there are snakes in the grass. Oh yes, I say, there’s snakes in the grass and you’d better watch out for them. Some of them will sit in the truck drinking Coke and watching me do it for them, complaining about the heat and the flies. Not this feller. He’s okay.’ She pulled in alongside the mine vehicle and switched off the motor. She swung her door open then reached back into the cabin and put her hand on Annabelle’s arm, ‘You sure you want to do it this way? You can still be a visitor if you like? You don’t have to get involved.’

Annabelle opened her passenger side door. ‘I’m already involved,’ she said. She smiled at Susan. ‘Let’s stick to the plan.’ She was wearing a pair of new green overalls, not dusted yet from travelling, the creases still showing from the shop. On her head one of Susan’s old wide-brimmed felt hats. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said and she reached and firmed the hat.

Susan held her gaze, questioning her.

‘I’ve hardly given him a thought, Sue. Honestly.’

‘Good for you!’

As she stepped down from the Pajero, Annabelle caught the trampled smell of the bush. She drew in a breath of the elusive fragrance, tantalising and familiar. The smell of life up here. There was no wind, a silvery membrane of palest blue shimmering in the remote stratosphere high above them. She was moved by recognition, something of memory and of curiosity and excitement in this apprehension. It was true: it astonished her to realise that she had scarcely thought of Steven all day. Perhaps she may even have begun to feel that the Steven she had loved and believed herself cherished by was dead or had always been an illusion. That man was still
somewhere
. In her mind. In her memory. That was not the man who had betrayed her. The man who had betrayed her was another man. A stranger. For the moment she did not feel required to consider Steven Küen or her own future, when she would undoubtedly once again be in Melbourne and would have to deal with the realities of her situation there. For the moment she found herself at liberty to be in the present, distracted from her fear of that other reality.

Susan said, ‘Annie, meet David Orlando. David, this is Dr Annabelle Küen, from Melbourne University. Annabelle’s going to be doing some casework up here with me for a while. I had to start from scratch when I came up here, but Annabelle’s a native of this part of the world.’

Annabelle stepped up and shook the mine man’s hand and said hello.

He smiled into her eyes, ‘Welcome to Burranbah, Annabelle. If there’s anything we can do to assist you while you’re up this way, you just let us know. Whereabouts are you from originally?’

‘Mount Coolon,’ she said, aware of the ringer’s interest. She pointed. ‘Mount Coolon’s about a hundred Ks through the ranges northwest of here.’ If the ringer was familiar with this Isaac River country around Burranbah, then she was confident he would have mustered the scrubs of her home country at some time in the past, so she added for his sake, ‘My parents had a cattle station on the Suttor before they sold up and moved to Townsville.’ She glanced across at him. He was watching her.

‘I don’t know Mount Coolon,’ David Orlando said. ‘But I do know there’s no coal deposits up that way. Have you ever seen a longwall operating?’

Annabelle said she hadn’t and confessed she did not know what a longwall was. She could feel the ringer examining her, figuring out who she was, placing her among the people of the remote cattle stations along the Suttor.

David Orlando indicated the ground where they were standing. ‘The longwall’s operating right here under our feet at this very minute.’ He pointed to the perimeter of the clearing. ‘If you’d like to step over here I’ll show you the subsidence cracks.’ He might have appointed himself their tour guide. He spoke as if he disclosed privileged information that must astonish them. ‘We’re taking out a seven-metre seam three hundred metres below us here and this surface is subsiding less than a metre.’ He looked at each of them in turn, ready to acknowledge their mystification. ‘Mining’s not what it used to be. These subsidence cracks are the only disturbance to the landscape, Annabelle. No mullock heaps. No removal of overburden. No open cut. She’s clean green coalmining.’ He grinned. ‘That’s longwalling. If you have a morning to spare for the induction while you’re up this way, I’ll take you underground and show you her operating. She’s an awesome sight.’ He held a hand over his head, palm flat to his hardhat and he bent his knees, making scooping motions in front of his belt buckle with his other hand. ‘She holds the overburden up while she rips out the coal and slips it back along the conveyor, and she walks forward as she clears the seam ahead of her.’ He stayed crouched, taking small scuffling steps forward. He looked back over his shoulder, still crouched, one hand still over his head, the other scooping, being the longwall. ‘And she lets the roof collapse in behind her.’ He straightened and wiped his palms, as if he really had been the machine digging coal. ‘And that’s how we get these subsidence cracks on the surface. The Burranbah machine’s the biggest in the world. Eighty million dollars worth of hydraulic hoists and conveyors down there thundering through the seam twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.’ His eyes shone. He turned to the other man. ‘I’m sorry Bo, I’m forgetting my manners.’

Susan stepped forward. ‘This is Bo Rennie, Annabelle. Bo’s representing the Jangga people. Dr Annabelle Küen, Bo.’

The ringer stepped forward and lifted his hat. ‘How do you do,’ he said. His manner formal and dignified, his voice little above a murmur.

She said, ‘Bo Rennie. That’s a name I know.’

The whirling world of the past forty-eight hours had suddenly come to a stop and she found herself standing in the stillness of the fragrant sandalwood scrub shaking this man’s hand. He observed her, waiting to know who she was. ‘Dad and Mum had Haddon Hill,’ she said, and she let go his hand.

‘Then you must be William Beck’s younger daughter that went down south.’

Annabelle turned to Susan. ‘The Rennies had Verbena Creek Station. Our homesteads were twenty miles apart. We had a common boundary along Gunn Creek.’

‘That’s right. Gunn Creek,’ he echoed her, his dark eyes steady on hers, the past secure with him.

She felt herself blushing. ‘So you’re Bo Rennie.’

‘Well they christened me Iain Ban Rennie, after my grandfather,’ he said playfully. ‘But then Grandma called me Bo and it stuck.’ His amused gaze confided a deeper understanding to her, however, a shared knowledge of the other’s past that set them apart from David Orlando and Susan Bassett, who stood by watching and unknowing.

Susan said, with a shade of fatigue or impatience in her voice, ‘Well, it sure is a small world out here once you get west of the ranges. I soon discovered that for myself, David. There aren’t many people out this way and you either know all of them or you don’t know any of them.’

Annabelle said, ‘We were born on adjoining stations and I heard of Bo, of course, but we never met. I was eleven when I went away to boarding school, and from school I went on to the uni.’ She turned to him. ‘Then I went overseas.’

Bo Rennie said evenly, ‘We met all right, Annabellebeck.’

She heard with astonishment the syllables of her name elided together on his murmuring voice, as if he rechristened her, or divined a secret intimacy in her name and laid a claim upon it.

‘Never! Where then?’ she challenged him.

He said easily, ‘The swimming hole by the redcliff.’

‘Oh?’

‘Grandma Rennie defied your old granddad. He wouldn’t have our mob on Haddon Hill, but she always told us the Suttor was our own country and she took us kids over to the swimming hole and defied him. Elizabeth never tell you about that? It was before you was old enough to remember. But I remember and I know Elizabeth remembers too. Grandma Rennie and your mother used to share a picnic back in them days. You and your sister Elizabeth and me and my sisters. We tumbled naked in the water together.’

Could his claim be true, she wondered. She knew the place and could see them there together, picnicking with their families, shining waterbabies in the pool below the redcliff where the mad explorer Ludwig Leichhardt paused in his wanderings more than a century and a half ago to sit cross-legged in the shade of the sweet flowering tea-trees and eat roast goose with Grandma Rennie’s Jangga forebears. Herself and Bo Rennie.

‘We met,’ he said and he took his tobacco from his shirt pocket and stood easily, his heels turned out, making a cigarette. As he progressed the cigarette he glanced up at her from under the brim of his hat a couple of times, as if to check on the progress of her thought. In the silence the steady thumping of music from the closed-up Ford truck. He licked the paper down and put his tobacco away and he said without surprise, ‘I knew you was gonna come back one day.’

She laughed shortly. ‘Well I didn’t.’ Did she imagine it, or did he offer an understanding that he had waited for her?

He nodded, knowing something, and lit the cigarette with a match. He tossed the lighted match into the grass.

David Orlando looked at the match, a curl of blue smoke rising from the silver grass. He stepped forward and put his foot on it. He looked at them all and said with a rising inflection of interested surprise, ‘So your grandfather owned a cattle station, Bo? That was unusual wasn’t it.’ He faltered, looking for encouragement to Susan and Annabelle. ‘I mean . . .’

‘My grandfather wasn’t a blackfeller, David,’ Bo Rennie said. ‘His old feller come over from Scotland.’ He turned, his hand going out in an indicating gesture, lining up a heading through the scrub to the northwest, explaining this detail of his story to David Orlando. ‘My Grandma now, she was born on the Suttor. Grandma Rennie was a traditional Jangga woman. One of the last give birth to up there in that stone country. She was took over to Ranna Station on the Broken River when she was a kid and she grew up there with them white Bigges girls as one of their family. That’s where my granddad, Iain Rennie, met her and they was married soon after. When he was killed off his horse, Iain left Verbena Station to Grandma.’ He looked up at David Orlando. ‘That’s how a Jangga woman come to have a cattle property out this way. It was unusual, David. You are quite right. But she was a unusual woman. She had them store people in Mount Coolon deal with her and us kids just the same way they dealt with the other station owners and their kids. We was on the tennis team the same as everyone. There was never no distinctions made while Grandma was alive.’