Shearers' Motel (18 page)

They camped at a shed where there was no work for a cook, and after a few hours sleep drove the last half-hour to the coast.

Sailing ships came this way last century, beating up from Antarctic waters, following the Great Circle route from England over thousands of miles of inhospitable sea. It was a place of wind-flattened cypress pines and small-windowed weatherboard houses — cold, wet and miserable for much of the year.

Today it was impossible to imagine storms and wreckage, though. The air was warm and still. In sheltered places it was hot. The sea heaved with a rainbow oiliness under a diffuse, hazy sun, with swathes of kelp in glassy rockpools, and basaltic, cone-shaped rocks glittering with fringes of salt.

It was full spring, with apple trees flowering on roadsides, hawthorn bushes ablaze with white blossom, and carpets of yellow capeweed on hillsides. They were in one of the few parts of Australia with reliable rainfall. March flies buzzed around bog-holes. Wild turnip was in flower. A flow of milky-warm air moved across undulating, treeless pasture, where creeks held rioting watercress, and
fencelines offered milk thistle. Every declivity showed a glimpse of the sea. The Kiwis said it was like home. They fanned out into paddocks, collecting armfuls of green, stuffing it into garbage bags.

An arrangement had been made with mates to go collecting sea urchins and abalone behind an ocean farm. They parked near a road quarry while Harold went in another car searching for a rendezvous. He came back after half an hour. ‘I found em. It's not happening. They're all still half-cut from last night.' So they went to the local post office feeling let down, to make phone calls and arrange something else. Harold's mystifying announcements about plan changes bedevilled all his dealings; but just then a cavalcade of vehicles pulled in. A middle-aged man, Reuben, led the way in a new Falcon station wagon.

‘It's all right,' Harold reported back. ‘It's on. Reuben says it's okay.'

Reuben, said Harold, was a wool broker who had come from New Zealand twenty-five years ago, had worked as a shearer and a contractor, and then built up his own business in Australia, travelling around in a chromium-plated Mack with high aluminium sides, buying wool for cash at the shed door.

 

They headed out of town in procession. Other cars appeared from side roads and joined the line. Everything was serene. Perfect. What was wrong with him that he felt displaced? This was not the trajectory he had set himself when he loaded the truck back at Braidwood almost a year ago, steering north by northwest, willing himself to keep going till the wheels fell off and he ploughed to rest in the interior somewhere. The first images of landscape he ever knew went out in that same direction, at the stillest time of year, high summer. All life was back in the baking earth, under dry leaves, in crevices of bark, on the undersides of stones. His soul's view snaked northwest over bleached grass and dry earth to a horizon of shimmering grey ironbarks. He wanted to be back at Gumbank rather than here.

Here, on the southern coast of Australia, puffs of Wilcannia dust shook through holes in the floor of the Hi-Lux. Fine sand filmed the dashboard. His clothes reeked of Sunlight soap from a grey, cold-water wash in an outdoor tub overlooking the Darling. He remembered getting to the station, waking on his bedroll in the back of the truck, watching a big goanna feeling its way up the trunk of a river red gum whose old shattered crown was like a city; and then getting up and walking where he pleased, following a wagtail from log to log, as if a secret was going to be revealed to him soon.

Always that.

And then Harold offering him this ride. Here, what it was, was that it was more like England than Australia, with goldfinches, larks, sparrows, elms, lindens, willows. All things were known. Even the haze seemed English — contented, doozy, over-with, somehow. Clover flowers stank, phalaris, cocksfoot and ryegrass erupted green. He had been to England and had felt enclosed there. He had never crossed the Tasman, but if this was what New Zealand was like, too, then give him red earth by preference, a line of emus stalking the nothingness, because he wanted sparser equivalents of himself. ‘Man's like the earth, his hair like grasse is grown, his veins the rivers are, his heart the stone.'

 

Twelve cars and the Hi-Lux slid between pine windbreaks on a dusty track, and snaked across lumpy green cow pasture. Each vehicle stubbed against the fender of the next in case of a wrong turn. Arms hung from windows and puffy, burr-thickened, leathery shearers' fingers jabbed the air.
Come this way. Stay together
. There was no one else around. A run-down farmhouse stood on a low ridge. Dogs barked in pens. Cattle morosely licked mineral supplement blocks. The idea of a fishing inspector hung in the air, a man within siren-reach somewhere, all his malice centred on Kiwis, who were holding their breath, hardly believing the day they had for themselves at last.

Across saline flats and broken-down fences the cars bounced on spongy cattle-grass. He saw Harold's face framed in a car window, wearing the same dazed expression he had worn the night he waded into the flooded Darling. This was how his children should be seeing him, but rarely would. Georgina would have liked to be on these six- to eight-week runs, through this lush, properly grassed country. She was scornful of the word grass in the inland town. ‘What grass?' It was coarse, sharp, unpleasant, and grew on carefully tended lawns, with copious waterings. Georgina had come down this way in previous years, cooking and rouseabouting. She might still come this year if Harold sent for her, which he would do if it suited work demands — if he needed an emergency rousie, say, or a fill-in cook. Then he would call her and get her on the bus quick-smart.

Gaps in the dunes appeared. The marram grass parted. In twos and threes, and with a conspiratorial burst of acceleration, each car of the procession found its way through to the sea.

 

Plastic net-bags were unloaded, flippers and wetsuits were taken out, air tanks and face masks and thick rubber gloves were sorted. Women sat among the rocks with small children and a newborn baby in a pink jump-suit and floppy shade hat.

Louella appeared, wearing a Harley T-shirt and a purple Indian cotton skirt. She split off from the rest, chin on her chest, black hair falling down over her face to hide herself from enquiring eyes.
I don't want to talk to none of yers
. Why, would be pointless to ask. Louella's people — these people here today — thought she'd be better off in New Zealand at her age, but if they thought that, why didn't they take up a collection and send her home? (The answer was, if they did, she'd throw the money back at them.) Louella gave out unhappiness with every slow glance — morose, mournful, depressed, moony. She settled into a hot little corner of rocks away from everyone else, but then after a while got up, advancing to the
water's edge. Tucking up her dress and trailing her brown ankles through salty tidepools, she had a melancholy attraction. She was the same age as his daughters. He wanted to go and talk to her the way he had seen Lenny talk to her lots of times, sitting on the bonnet of the ute under a peppercorn tree or on a riverbank. Their heads close. Their shoulders touching. Lenny smiling quizzically. Louella twisting jet-black hair round her fingers and grinning crookedly, shaking her head, smiling, even laughing a little, having pleasure drawn out of her bit by bit. He had seen Louella unreservedly happy only once. It was on a Saturday afternoon when everyone else had gone to town. She lay on her stomach on a mattress in the quarters at Gograndli Station, chin cupped on hands, ankles crossed, her boyfriend's sandy, close-cropped head twined with her beautiful dark one, two teenagers engrossed in idle comparisons of likes and dislikes. She had given Cookie a small wave and smiled when he passed down the lane between the bakingly hot galvanised iron buildings. One weekend she went all the way to Holbrook with her boyfriend, Aussie. There was a barbecue and she met his parents on their wheat property. Something went wrong: some carelessly wounding word from an older woman (you could bet) over the shashlik and rissoles and Griffith lambrusco. It would have spoiled things for Louella, whatever it was, triggering her lavalike thought, her burning river of resentment.
Up yerselves yer pake bitches. The same goes for all of yers
.

 

Above the tideline, silver-haired Reuben hung back from the rest, not getting involved yet, standing with legs apart, arms folded, wearing a white canvas tennis hat. He was never quite alone. Men approached him at respectful intervals. There was Ulysses, ‘the typical old Mo'hi' — about ten years older than Harold.

Harold walked up the beach and consulted Reuben with his hands clasped behind his back; grave, judicious, thirty-five year old Harold. He stood the way ministers used to stand talking to parishioners outside churches.
Maybe they were talking about Louella, considering her welfare. But more likely they were talking about wool prices, the oversupply of sheep numbers, and the phenomenon people were noticing that season, that down here in some of the richest sheep towns known — meccas for shearers from all over Australasia — there were shearers sitting on their backsides because there was no work for them.

Rocco and his younger brother Bradshaw came and spoke to Reuben. They had a military, athletic bearing. With his trim moustache and slicked-back short hair, Rocco looked like a guardsman awaiting orders for the Western Front, while Bradshaw bounced up and down beside him with the quick-footed nervous energy of a boxer or a rap dancer. They spoke in Maori when they talked to Reuben. It was the first time Cookie had heard the language used. He commented on this to Harold, who said that Rocco and Bradshaw spoke Maori better than English. Then Harold put a hand up to his face, covering his eyes, peering through his fingers. It was a gesture he used in the sheds when he had to contradict himself and countermand previous decisions. ‘I am really happy being with these guys. All my old ways are coming back to me. I feel this is how I want things to be all the time. This is what I don't like about being in Australia. I don't want my children to miss out on this in their growing up.'

There on the beach people were different from how they were in the sheds. Their worker-carapaces were off. Maybe he hadn't really looked at them before — only seen them at their jobs, making the mistake of thinking that people were always only or mostly what they did. Here there was a different feeling about life. Gestures harmonised with the bright white sand and the hot jumbled rocks, and the deep wide rockpools of the reef where men and girls climbed into the water and shoved off towards the thin blue line of the horizon.

He watched Harold making his way out. He was wearing green shorts and a football guernsey, and old split sandshoes. He was back in his wading motion again.
Soon he was up to his belly, his chest, his shoulders, facing out to sea. His dark round head bobbed and sank, rose and shook itself. As he moved along he talked to snorkellers out on his flank somewhere, bubbles of his laughter (it could be described as jolly) floating back across the calm water for a hundred metres or more, a settled, soothing sound, so relaxed and appropriate and in place that any sense of unbelonging had no strength, no further relevance.

He felt sorry for the expedients that made lives what they were, shattered them into a thousand discrepancies and differences, when all that was wanted was coherence. He felt it for himself on the Greyhound bus taking him all the way back to Broken Hill, then on to Wilcannia. He stepped down at a crossroads on the floodplain, and started walking south along the river road in the emptiness of evening. He knew there would soon be a shearer coming along, and there was.

He stepped away from the Gumbank quarters, slithered down a slope of old bottles and rusted cans.

Looked back. A glance along the skyline revealed cook's room, meat house, the jumble of huts. Seen from outside, the place held its purpose like a secret. It held an aura of the last century — soon to be the century before last. The crumbling chimney was a haven for wagtails and swallows. Deadly nightshade invaded footways. Dust seeped under doors. The heaving cry of crows scraped across tin. This image of romantic decay was remote from ordinary life. Split images of place: this perspective, and what happened in there day after day for the three weeks of shearing, contested with images from the musty, rat-chewed pages of
On the Wool Track
, written eighty years ago by a
Sydney Morning
Herald journalist, C. E. W. Bean. He had been reading it on and off for months. Even during the past week and a half, when he'd camped on the riverbank, waiting for Harold and the team to return from down south, he had read very little.

He looked back at the roofline. The overseer's room (like the cook's room) was detached from the rest of the quarters: two bedrooms and an anteroom with old
wooden dresser, and wicker chairs. Bean would surely have checked it out on his way through Gumbank in the 1910s. (He pictured a pair of authority figures, overseer and classer, wearing white cotton coats, stroking long moustaches, giving Bean the drum.) The reality last night: grinder in action, the room packed — the classer sprawled in one chair, the cook ‘checking things out' in the other, power cord snaking outside to generator, Lenny wearing deershooter's checked jacket, the classer in Ugh boots, Matthew, sacked that day, but not caring, hating shed work. Harold, back from supper with the owners, in R. M. Williams boots, moleskins, quality wool sweater, reminiscing affectionately above the scream of metal and shower of sparks about other shearers: Old Ulysses — ‘Been here fourteen years and still the typical Mo'hi: woollen sweater with sleeves cut off, tracksuit pants, joggers with the socks wrapped round them', Arnie — ‘Oooh. Watch out when he's had too much. Nail up the doors. Lock him in the boot.'

He walked away from the friendly-family-crowdedness of the quarters into the hard sunlight edged with muted olive-greens and yellowy mud-creams along the riverbank. Walked into timebends. The river snaking off into reach after reach of gentle zig-zags, water coming down from Queensland, spreading its silt, then nosing toward a destination thousands of kilometres to the south. He lived on this river as a child, at Bourke, and hated it. Current sweeping past, at five k.p.h. or faster, creating backward-running eddies. Full enough to be spilling into billabongs. He'd go for a look now, a wool walk within sound of the shed. Not just natural debris swept past, but bottles and empty beer cans. The rising water was from a freak downpour at Nyngan, coming all the way round from the Bogan over many weeks. Easy to stand there all day, hypnotically watching the changes. From the shed the shearers were getting a glimpse of their cook threading between river gums with the world at his disposal. Enviable bastard. Whips through his work and has time off.

When C. E. W. Bean came this way the station was bigger. He noted it shore 70 000 when the country was new to the ‘raw white man' — and then had its capacity reduced to 16 000 after sheep had mauled it. Bean had the privilege of speaking to ‘the first baby that ever came to Cobar', its parents tying a piece of red flannel in its hair to find it in the long grass. Sheep changed that. That first baby was white. Off the edge of his wool map — ‘few blacks'.

Six months before, when he asked the owner of Gograndli Station why his NRMA road map didn't show Dunlop Station, scene of the first introduction of shearing machinery in 1888, when every other station in the Western Division, large and small, was marked, the cocky had an explanation: ‘Isn't that the one they gave to the Abos?'

For every hundred kilometres by road along the Darling, it was three hundred by river. The chug of the shed engine rose and fell as he followed the meanders, the riverbanks stately as an earl's parkland. Successive concertina-reaches of treeline drew him on. Newly shorn sheep stared from a few hundred metres away — five hundred stubborn rheumy gazes. How dare he intrude on what was theirs. Old river red gums marked the way, gnarled, wrinkled, massive. The river paddock was a well-used home paddock, but trees regenerated there. He tried to guess why: maybe because for months on end, in certain years, the river snaked around behind itself, creating sheepless islands, giving growth a chance to return. He came across a fat goanna clutching the girth of a red gum, its skin like the freckled bands of a sand painting, its powerful legs spotted yellow. A slim face peered down disdainfully, the narrowing-to-delicacy chain-mail tail just out of reach. A reptile close to a metre and a half long, looking immortal in its elevated hunting ground.

Swarms of mosquitoes drove him on. He had a feeling of sleepiness, dream, the result of tiredness from work, the hot afternoon, the elation of letting go. He tracked a wagtail from grass-stem to grass-stem, tame but elusive,
hovering at knee-height, just beyond reach. He found a store of fish-traps in a hollow log, with wheel-tracks leading away. For every yellowbelly trapped in this part of the Darling, three carp were caught. The river was rising by the hour — flattened, smooth, implacable. Rafts of foam swept round bends. Tree branches loosened from the banks surged in the current like half-sunken barges. Along came a plastic meat tray. Glass wine flagons. Whole flotillas of beer cans — Resch's, Tooheys, West End, VB, Fourex, Foster's. Huck Finn should be here. He recognised another part of himself, the side that hard work fitfully allowed, his childhood self going past and onwards in the riverflow. Some things were bizarre. A shire road barrier was wedged in a tree from an earlier flood. This ‘fresh' wouldn't go as high as that. Much of the debris was the rubbish of leisure seekers who'd come down the Darling by boat, months or years before.

He clambered down the steep, sheep-bitten bank with exposed tree-roots like jug handles. He squatted by the water's edge. He jammed in a stick (and would return tomorrow for a look). He did the same thing forty years ago: threw in a line — caught catfish, perch, bony bream. No carp in the river then. He remembered the Darling flood of 1950. He was eight years old. He remembered the six weeks it took for the water to come down from Queensland, the excitement of waiting, like Christmas. Remembered blitz wagons touring Bourke calling for volunteers through loudspeakers. His father going out to fill sandbags on the levee banks, the Presbyterian minister doing his bit with an Irish-Catholic priest — Hugh Fraser McDonald offering Patrick Tracey a ride home in the Chev. ‘Where to, Father?' ‘First stop — the public bar.' He remembered the Aboriginal family camped in the gutted hotel across from the church, driven up from the town common by floodwaters. In from off the map. He and his brothers and their friends, playing billycarts. Army ducks rescuing tetchy old-timers from trees. Photographers from
Truth
swaggering into town, finding nothing newsworthy enough, so smashing windows in an
old hut somewhere, inventing sensation. He remembered the dead, muddy stink over the town as the floodwaters receded. A boy died of rheumatic fever — Charlie Brown — and was buried in a sky-blue coffin. That was when he asked his mother not to bury him in Bourke if he died there.

He squatted on his haunches where a sharp bend of the river spilled over into a billabong. He watched a trickle of floodwater meander through burrs, dribble down cracks in silt. In a day or two the tiny flow would become a pouring rush. The billabong hung like a flattened question mark a few hundred metres east of the river. Its waters were shallow, mud-rimmed, puggy from hoof-marks of sheep, cattle, wild pigs. His mate Quinn would like this. A tangle of lignum hugged the shore — haunt of wild boars. The shallow, motionless water was thick with trapped waterlife. Carp made sluggish gulps. Birds were everywhere — pelicans, ducks, cormorants, finches, wagtails, corellas, hawks.

He wondered why he hated the river as a child. When he went farther west, visiting the stations with his father, the landscape of Sturt's pea, leopardwood, bloodwood and gidgee gave time for thoughts to catch up to themselves, to meander. Somehow he hated it for its bindiicarpets, its sudden frights of cattle crashing through overthick growth, the suspicion of enraged boars lurking about, the ugliness and foul odours of mud pools. Scrambling out after a swim was a mud-struggle. Floods brought corpses. Strange people were drawn to the river. Up Arcadian reaches, spirals of smoke betrayed loners camped on grassy banks. It was better not to go too close. Maybe they were shearers between sheds. Maybe they were loonies.

 

Up at Wilga Station he had taken a long walk and become lost. There were no riverbends to follow up there. It was hard against the Queensland border, near Yarralee, where his older brother had worked as a station manager once, doing nothing except clear sand from bore drains in
a drought. Heartbreak country — ‘out where the dead men lie'.

He set his pocket-timer for three hours (leaving a leg of mutton in the oven), pocketed a container of orange juice, and jammed his hat on his head. Away from the overgrazed holding paddocks the country was no longer nightmarish, but a place to recover lost dreams. His boots crunched on dry bark and sticks. To his left was a fence with a telegraph wire running along the top, and in the middle-distance, low red sandhills. He kept an eye on the telegraph-wire fence, using it as a guide. Not that he thought he'd get lost — not him, he knew all the pitfalls. Emus appeared, a parent with seven almost fully-grown chicks. They let him get close, then pounded away with feathers flouncing, hesitating only slightly as they ushered themselves through the fence, then strode up a slope of sand and disappeared into the low scrub of the near horizon. He walked on through stands of dusty gidgee and shining-leaved bloodwoods. Corellas flashed their pink underwings. A clump of large, broad trees — coolabahs — created a vision of a watercourse. (Perhaps he clambered over another fence somewhere here — he didn't remember.) He brushed through low-slung coolabah branches, entering a shaded lagoon. It must have been around then that he became lost.

The dry lagoon twisted through the trees and came out after a few hundred metres into the intensified glare of afternoon. He could no longer see the fence with the telegraph line but had fixed its location in his mind. He was happy out there under the burning, dry sun. He drained half his orange juice and picked out a circle to walk through in the trees up ahead. A tantalising promise seemed to draw him on. Dry blonded native grasses bent under a light breeze. Scattered gidgee, bloodwood, and the beautiful leopard-gum created a mirage of restfulness in the distance, an illusion of peace always just out of reach. He rose to the bait that had deceived the first newcomers: easy to picture water farther on, just across that low rise there. Hard to compel the mind to stamp out
the vision of a cottage, maybe a homestead, and a smoothly-graded roadway leading to some cluster of human occupation. A small town in the scrub, even, and a roadhouse serving cold beer.

Looming on the left was a stand of dead gidgee. Gathered inside it was a family of grey kangaroos. There couldn't have been much roo shooting on the station because these roos were bold. They let him walk almost as close as the emus had, then the family bounded a retreat, while one held back — the male, he guessed — challenging him with a chesty bad-tempered grunt among the desolate dead trees.

That was all it took to dissolve the mood. He decided it was time to turn back. The circle through the trees on the return to the dry lagoon didn't take long — seemed hardly any time at all as he clambered over fallen logs and pushed through saucer-shaped depressions thick with scrub. Something on a grassy open space interested him: curious that he couldn't remember what it was. Animal tracks, ant-lines, the stillness, the living heat, some tiny movement drawing his eye one way, and his feet following, while in his mind he was always bearing back to the right, in the other direction.

The coolabahs at the dry lagoon loomed up where he expected them, but when he pushed through, the dry lagoon wasn't there. Just a jumble of decaying logs, struggling saplings, humps of earth, signs of old tractor work, a ripping away at roots of old woody shrubs. He angled an ear and listened for the sound of the generator back at the shed. Nothing. Mentally he sorted things through — where the sun had been positioned back when he started, where the last fence ran. It was like flipping through a stack of cards, watching for the right one to turn up. Up ahead, after a five-minute exploration, he saw a glitter of new fencing. Then he saw a telegraph line running along the fenceline, and it didn't make sense. (The fence he'd used as his guide was an old one.) Sections of old fence could have been replaced by new, but when he followed the telegraph line to a cornerpost the line swung away
from the fence altogether and marched off over the horizon. He was lost.

Same trees, same sky, same earth. He'd been skidded across into an ironically different bushscape. Being lost was like being trapped in a photograph of somewhere he knew, but with no way to grab the third dimension. He'd assumed that those telegraph lines of thick galvanised wire strung along rickety poles were hangovers from the era of boundary riders. In fact (he found later) they were phone lines in use. The scant scrubland was as deeply networked with blocked eyelines as anywhere else in Australia. His mistake to think he'd made a connection to things, that the maze of landscape had welcomed him in, given him the right clues. The bush didn't care. He'd made a mockery of himself.

That leg of mutton in the oven back at the shearers' quarters — when it burned the alarm would go up.

By then it would be dark. He would make a bed in the sand and moodily build a fire. He wouldn't be able to sleep for trying to invent some joke for when he was found, to counteract the one played on him, to cover his shame. ‘Couldn't take his own cooking any more?' At first light tomorrow the cocky would get out his plane and come looking.