Shearers' Motel Read online

  Roger McDonald was born in rural New South Wales in 1941 and educated at country schools and in Sydney. His writing career began with poetry, moved on to fiction, and encompasses travel writing, essays and screenplays. His books have been published in Australia, the UK and the US.

  His first novel 1915 won the Age Book of the Year and the South Australian Government Biennial Prize for Literature in 1979, and his most recent novel Mr Darwin’s Shooter won the 1999 NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction, the 1999 Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction, the 2000 National Fiction Award and the 2000 SA Premier’s Literary Award.

  Shearer’s Motel won the 1993 National Book Council Banjo Award for Non-Fiction.

  Also by Roger McDonald

  FICTION:

  1915

  Slipstream

  Rough Wallaby

  Water Man

  The Slap

  Mr Darwin’s Shooter

  AS EDITOR:

  Gone Bush

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Shearers’ Motel

  9781742754673

  A Vintage book

  published by

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  http://www.randomhouse.com.au

  Sydney New York Toronto

  London Auckland Johannesburg

  First published 1992

  This Vintage edition published 2001

  Copyright © Roger McDonald 1992

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  McDonald, Roger, 1941–.

  Shearers’ motel.

  ISBN 978 1 74051 051 6.

  ISBN 1 74051 051 8.

  1. Sheep shearers (Persons) – Australia – Social life and customs. 2. Sheepshearing – Australia. 3. Australia – Description and travel. I. Title.

  636.30833

  ‘We wish we were leaving here. We wish we were packing up and going over to the next shed. And we’re thinking, Why? It’s the same as this one. Bound to be. But we still want to go.’

  Dedicated with affection and respect to

  Hemi and Rewi

  and the teams I worked for in 1989 and 1990.

  The author thanks the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts and the Literature Board of the Australia Council for fellowships assisting the research and writing of this book. Two sections originally appeared in different forms in Gone Bush (Bantam Books) and The Independent Monthly. The work was completed while I was (honorary) writer in residence, English Department, University of Sydney.

  Considerable thanks are owed to many friends who helped with background: notably Hemi, Kere, Marama, and Rewi Taurau; Bruce Lambeth; Ihaia Pattison; Paul and Marlene Rowe; Susie McIlveen; Samson and Wilson Te Whata; and Susan Mulcahy. Also Debbie Jackson; Erina Scia Scia; Talmadge Harris; Whiti Raharuhi; Ross Tua; John Cain; Brian Clarke; Megan, Mary Rose and Don Bell; Olive and Ross McInerney; Bob Tully; Jane Scale; Lindsay Pitcher; James Morgan; Royce Lloyd; Mark Kenney; Alan White; Ben and Paula Martin; Bernice Daly and ABC-TV ‘Big Country’; Sally McInerney; Jack Hodgins; Rhyll McMaster; and some few who asked not to be named.

  ‘A young farmer used to ride past a lake and he saw a woman’s image in the lake and he wished that she’d come out and she did come out on condition he never touched her with anything that was steel. Anyway, they got married. They went to a funeral and she laughed and he said, “Why are you laughing?” and she said, “Well, now his problems are over.” And everybody was taken aback. Then she went to a wedding and she cried. They wanted to know why she was so sad, and she said, “Well, now their problems begin.” Eventually he touched her with a walking stick with a steel cap and she went back to the lake.’

  Shed

  to separate, divide

  throw off, repel, scatter

  Shed

  to shelter

  Shed

  to pour out, let flow

  send forth as an emanation

  Shed

  (Aust. & N.Z.)

  a shearing shed

  ‘An old Maori lady once said, “Never touch the handpiece. If you once touch the handpiece, then you’re gone.”’

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Roger McDonald

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Firstcomer

  1

  Cross Turning Over

  OPENING STORES

  OBLIGING THE COUNTRY

  CHOSEN

  THE GRISTLE

  COUNTED IN

  NO SUCH PERSON AS A GOOD COOK

  MELON GLUT

  BURR ON BURR

  BLAME THE STARS

  AVAILABLE FOR WORK

  2

  In the Life

  FINDING ANOTHER WAY IN

  OUTSIDE TIME

  ART OF COOKING

  YORK AND QUINN

  MOMENTUM

  ANOTHER COUNTRY

  WORLD BEATER

  KNIFE EDGE

  A PLACE IN THE HILLS

  NOTES FROM A BOG JAM

  AUSTRALIAN SHED

  HEART BY THE FIRE

  3

  Driving Across the Sky

  THE LIGHTS OF WILGA

  LAST HOUSE

  BEING A SHEEP

  IN TOWN

  OCEAN OF LAND

  TIDELINE

  LOST

  A DOOR OPENS

  SPARKY

  A DOOR SHUTS

  AN IMAGE

  THE VULCAN

  STABBER

  4

  Fire Stones

  WELCOME CORNER

  THE BUG

  THE GROUND OVEN

  SHEARERS’ MOTEL

  Epilogue

  Dancing With Smoke

  PROLOGUE

  FIRSTCOMER

  He wanted to say no to melons like Bertram Junior had. He wanted to lie all day on a mattress, chin on his hands like Louella. He wanted to be hard like Lenny, drinking everyone under the table and still be pulling another West End from the fridge when the breakfast bell rang. He wanted to name who liked work, and who was afraid of work. He wanted to give Betty the lowdown on unions, and withstand the glare of her husband, who only needed to shift sideways to crush him.

  He wanted to be a non-drinker and a Christian. He wanted to sit on his throne of clouds like Harold. He wanted to let go, laugh, and be like a child. He wanted to tip buckets of water on Bradshaw, and walk in at lunch, look around, make that his meal, as Rocco had. Felled by labour, he wanted the solitude of his pride in the smoko room, speaking to no one. He wanted to put coloured beads in his hair like Jules, and wanted to say, ‘A man of forty-five should know better’.

  At the root of the work-ladder he wanted to be foul as Wade arriving from Charleville, tattered and snarling, beard si
nged by cigarette ash and full of sandwich crumbs. He wanted his T-shirt moth-eaten by waste. He wanted to declare: ‘Write about me, but only write the truth’. He wanted his hopelessness strewn at the feet of mentors, male and female, mother and dad, uncle, cousin, big brother, teacher-substitutes awaiting his betrayal. He wanted to beat them all at chess. He wanted to be taken under the wing of people whose wisdom was a revelation and whose friendship was love, whose exasperation he could badmouth as know-nothingness. He wanted to journey inwards in destruction. He wanted to finish the year hated by all, Christlike in his truculence, ready to throw in the towel. He wanted to break into a stock agent’s office, take the typewriters and computers, a load of unsaleable junk in a stolen van, that he would sell to a passer-by, and get what he wanted, be put under arrest, taken care of at last, a sort of paradise, a kind of death.

  He wanted rest — to be the cook who could take no more, who served breakfast and shot through, like Hazel who wanted her life to consume her, leaving nothing else, no trace.

  He wanted to find his own story.

  He wanted to drive all night under the lip of a thunderhead and the floodwaters’ wave in the contractor’s Fairlane, to be a shearer, only a fucking shearer, answering a need when it was put to him, to take breakfast if it was offered (but only if it was offered) and slip into his singlet an hour late, and ring the board. He wanted to get drunk for a week with his joints like rubber and climb a metal upright in sight of a thousand people, and scream at the top of his lungs, DON’T FUCK WITH THE KIWIS. He wanted to read the Bible, tread like a cat, lift weights, punch the bag, move like a shadow, fly a plane, own a house, remarry his own family. He wanted to stop looking over the fence and come in from his own anger. He wanted to love Jesus as the only reality, if it was true.

  He wanted to remember happy times. He wanted to go south, like Quinn, and find the girl who was there at the start, leaning on a hut wall, her arms full of wildflowers. He wanted to be divorced, alone, arrived in this country for the first time, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and watching an ant-line outside a wash-house. He wanted to scream, Look at this everyone at the most ordinary things. He wanted to see the brilliant birds — budgerigars, rosellas, galahs and white cockatoos — as if they had all been newly painted in colours of blood and milk and torn magazine pages, and to stroll the banks of the lagoon among pelicans, cormorants, ducks, waterhen, dingoes. He wanted to be the one who cut loose from the camp and followed the bush rat, the swallow, living on leftovers, sheltering in ruins.

  He wanted to be a teetotaller and when he reached town he wanted to show his stuff. He wanted to walk into the club with a woman, and when the young cops fresh from Sydney shouldered him outside and began beating him against a wall, he wanted to take only so much, and then he wanted to tell them he would kill them if they laid another finger on him. And they would go away.

  He wanted to feel the shame of being a newcomer and loving a country at first sight, having that love abused out of him, ending up on a barstool in the Riverina somewhere, just another bum.

  He wanted to be chosen. He wanted someone to take the trouble to reach him wherever he was. He wanted a slip of paper passed to him by a man named Clean Team Alastair with a phone number on it. He wanted a horn to be blown in the caravan park before daylight. He wanted arrangements to be made on his behalf, to be sought out, to have the clutch repaired at someone else’s expense before he left, the sump welded, the tank topped up.

  Following old tyre-tracks through stands of leopardwood and gidgee, he wanted to be the firstcomer.

  He wanted to enter a situation as familiar to him as his own face, this being the place where he was born, where the ghost of mother waited in the kitchen shadows and the ghost of father sharpened the butcher’s knife on a long steel. At the end of the shed he wanted to say, as Willie-boy had said, ‘Our little family is breaking up’.

  1

  CROSS TURNING OVER

  OPENING STORES

  It was a Saturday afternoon and he was on the phone calling about work. He tried to picture what was happening in the room at the other end of the line.

  A cricket telecast was running. A dog barked. The noise of a car engine swelled, drowning all conversation as if the car was advancing right into the room with the exhaust burbling, the tappets clicking. A woman’s voice came from outside somewhere. She was calling children. There was a loose, banging, aluminium screen door. The car noise faded. There were cries of children scattering underfoot. There was a dull sizzling noise, like flies trapped against gauze.

  Then silence and a voice speaking to one side: ‘It’s that bloke again. He says he can cook. He says he’s got his own transport. He says he can be out there at the station the day before start.’

  So what is the problem?

  ‘He is asking what we like to eat.’

  Tell im.

  ‘Plenty of fruit in this weather, that is for sure. Now he is asking what sort of fruit.’

  We never say no to melons.

  ‘Now he is asking what sort of melons.’

  Watermelons … Or whatever. Tell him it’s up to him to decide. Is he still there?

  ‘Still there, Cookie?’

  He was still there, trying to get his thoughts together. He noted down melons. He noted down the name Cookie, underlining it with a query. (Was that him?) He noted down Leopardwood Downs Station, where the work would begin. He pictured the men he was calling frowning with concentration as they awaited his answers, sweat rolling down their faces in the summer heat of the dry inland town where they lived.

  ‘Alastair said to ring you, he said you were good blokes.’

  ‘He said what?’

  There was a sound like a steel barrel rolling down concrete stairs.

  He pictured the men on the other end of the line. They were huge, brown, with arms like hams, bellies like sacks of wheat, fists like hammers. They were sunk deep in easy chairs, wearing white singlets, XOS rugby shorts and rubber thongs, and clutching condensation-dripping stubbies of South Australian beer. They said hem for him, thunk for think, thet for that. Their rendition of Cookie sounded like Cocky. They breathed heavily, as if they had recently completed a task of considerable effort, and were now standing back from it. In the inland town where they lived there would be blinds drawn against glare, shiny linoleum in the half dark. Outdoors would be like the red planet, coppery boulders and hot wind.

  ‘The bloke is asking what he can bring. He says he’s got a one-ton truck and a standard opening stores order, but he don’t know if we want everything on it, or different stuff. He says he has a mate, a grocer, in the town where he lives. He can have a stores order made up so long as we tell him what is wanted.’

  I don’t know that we can do that. Not right now, tell him. We’ve got too much on our plate.

  He said they weren’t to worry if it made things difficult for them. He only wanted to do the right thing by them.

  The main speaker had a voice that cradled him around with consideration. ‘We only want to do the right thing by you, Cookie.’ It was a bulky man’s slightly pinched voice, made into a tenor (so he conceived) under the pressure of chest measurement, shoulder width, gut and thigh size. The voice had a rising intonation in it as if the speaker was squeezed into a tiny chair and was staring at a spot three-quarters of the way up a wall, as if he was raising a hefty chin upwards while holding the telephone handpiece away, not concentrating fully on what was being said, not because of these diversions going on all the time — motor vehicles, dogs, other people, dropped steel — but because of a degree of inner interest in himself that he would not surrender to anyone.

  The speaker’s name was Bertram Junior. That was his older brother Harold, he said, talking across the telephone handpiece, making a series of level, judicious impressions while chopping and changing, saying yes, do that, and no, do the other.

  I am not feeling too good about this. I am feeling a little exasperated. Tell the bloke he is the one who is the cook. Get
him to get receipts for what he buys, and we will reimburse him. Tell him we’re pretty easy to please, and we like plenty of variety, but not too much of everything, as there will only be nine of yous, including himself. Tell him go easy on the luxuries.

  ‘He says he doesn’t know what you mean when you say luxuries.’

  You said he had a opening stores list.

  He looked at his opening stores list. It lay on a table in front of him, an inky fax. It said black sauce, parisian essence, cream of tartar, gravy powder, custard powder, lemon essence, mixed herbs, flavoured jellies, saltpetre. It ran to three closely typed columns. It was like something from another century.

  Jes tell him to get out to the station on the day. Jes tell him to come. I will fill a stores order here, and you can take it up to the station for him.

  ‘He is saying he’ll load up with melons along the way.’

  Tell im fine.

  ‘Whatever you decide, Cookie.’

  In his mood of change he wanted to kick open gates, roll back horizons, see how far he could travel before the wheels of unfamiliarity fell off. Wanted to appear at the door of a tumbledown hut somewhere holding his trousers up with string, hair in a mess, five days’ growth on his chin, feet dragging around in ruptured slippers. Wanted to stalk the day with a smouldering bumper on his lip and disclose nothing to anyone if he could avoid it. So call him Cookie, he liked that, a man with watermelons at the top of his mental checklist, and not much else. (Melons being the only thing he seemed to be able to talk about at present.)