Shearers' Motel Read online

  A minute before seven. Morning filling the windows. A glimpse of trees advancing from the horizon with bars of smoky sunlight coming through like notes of a trumpet blast. The shearers sliding their plates into the sink.

  ‘Tah, mate.’

  ‘No worries.’

  They were away to the shed.

  Action. Cleared space on the table for sandwich boxes, but waited — ‘Morning, Skye’, ‘Lou, you awake?’ — before grabbing the leftovers. Wondered why most women were no good first thing.

  ‘No egg, thanks,’ from Mack, last taker for liver and heart.

  Started making the smoko. Transformed the leftovers into spreads. Laid out slices of cold mutton on white-sliced sandwich bread with mustard-pickle. Buttered last night’s fresh-baked gingerbread loaf. Whipped jam onto three halved bread rolls making six scone-like portions. Stacked forearm-long row of triangled sandwiches into greaseproof-lined plastic box. Feeling of satisfaction: breakfast barely over, and morning smoko in the bag already.

  Stood at the door throwing scraps of leftover heart to Sadie, who almost backflipped catching it.

  Mentally searched for a gap in the day, a space to step through. But couldn’t imagine one.

  At seven-thirty caught a special sound against the constant noise of bleating sheep and yapping dogs: chug of the engine from the shed, shearing starting for the day, the first bellies dropping to the board, the rousies still dashing over. There was Louella shortcutting up to the kitchen door:

  ‘Hey, Cookie, y’got en apple?’

  Course he had.

  In the kitchen rolled up sleeves, tied on apron, and dived into the washing-up. Thought of nothing at all. Just felt the wall of tiredness behind his eyes like an illness that wouldn’t go away.

  Peaceful in the quarters, though. A coffee and a cigarette on the steps in the sun would be good, gazing out over the low-lit plain, daydreaming, stealing a moment from the best time of day, leafing through a particular book. He thought about stepping out there later, taking a walk to the billabong, seeing what was where in the light-and sheep-altered riverscape. An hour midafternoon? But this was shearers’ cooking. He was run off his feet. Day smashed dreams into fragments, leaving them as fibrous dry bark, hot stones, curled dry leaves in the sun. The carcase hung in the meat house ready for cutting down before the morning’s heat began. And something else to do first. Make bread.

  White-sliced came twice a week and tasted like nothing (was useful only as a platform for sandwich fillings). So while sunlight reached for the gauze of the meat house, he strapped on the apron of his trade, and started baking. Word about his bread had spread. Old Jake, at Leopardwood, had taken a green plastic garbage bag full of his dinner rolls to Queensland. ‘These’ll keep me going, Cookie.’ His bread was being eaten at Brinard, the northernmost shed in Australia.

  He washed his hands, and then, armed with chopper, meat-saw and meat-knife, attacked the sheep carcase. No gambrel here at Gograndli, only an S-hook through the tail-bone. Made horizontal saw-cuts, removed carcase in sections, sawed down spine, aligned ribs, whacked into chops. Off with the shanks. Trimmed flap. Lugged the meat back into the quarters and stacked the left-hand fridge. Washed hands again. Threw bones and flap into the stock pot. Sluiced out meat house with boiling water. Washed hands once more, thinking about hygiene, the closed cycle of disease in sheds. Vomiting and diarrhoea happened. Harold went out behind the huts the night before last and brought up his meal. Nobody else was sick, and Harold was fine in the morning.

  Checked time: nine-thirteen. Lit gas under kettle, and remembered the bread: kneaded with controlled patience for five minutes, air sacs in the dough popping like bubblegum, then gathered the smoko boxes up and stepped outside.

  Walked the narrow track above the riverbank with sunlight on his back and into the long, dark, earth-floored wool bay with its part-open corrugated iron sides.

  Shadowy there in the shed (the shearers often complained), so watched step on wobbly planks. (Mack put a nail through his foot on Friday. It wasn’t healing.) Took a quick look round. Din of compressor, shouts of the men on the board as they grabbed the last sheep of the run. Last dashes of rousies, last arm-swipes of classer, last lunge of presser’s arms as the plate drove down into the Stevlon and there was no hideous accident. Then turned and arranged the smoko items on a pressed bale.

  Headed back to the kitchen for the teapot. Kettle not quite boiled — stared at it hard, swearing. Back in the shed the shearers were waiting, biting on quartered oranges, inspecting the sandwich fillings. Personal service as the cook poured.

  ‘Strong enough?’

  ‘Looks bloody good.’

  The rousies still on the run. They’d get smoko pickings only. A brief word from Harold: ‘Everything okay in the kitchen?’

  ‘It’s a breeze.’

  Harold a cunning overseer, offering help with washing-up, suggesting he’d send a rousie to fetch smokos. Cook’s pride at stake. Refused all that. Aim always to work for larger teams on contract. Make the quid. Pass any test. Climb the ladder of Alastair Crown’s contracting services.

  Asked around about private stores. Not much wanted. Some would head into town Friday night, others all the way back to the Hill. Tobacco for one, beer for another. All wanted metho for yolk boils. Mack had a lump in his groin the size of an emu egg and was pulling the pin. Harold had to find a new presser, and then another man said he’d catch a ride with Mack, so he needed another shearer too. ‘Keep this under your hat. I don’t want Winston on the phone to Alastair.’

  Back in the kitchen, the whole morning’s effort a thing of the past. Massive involvement and expenditure of devotion gone as if it had never been. Human work, so particular, so unrelenting, passing over the landscape of individuality like cloud shadow.

  He looked to the rest of the day. Lit oven for bread. Added matches to stores list. Thought more about stores: prowled kitchen, inspected fridges, added further items to list. Margarine, tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, Alfoil, cordial, sliced bread, UHT milk, cream, tinned fruit. Wrote down: metho, tobacco, cig papers, beer. It was a Wednesday, shed would last another two weeks. Brown sugar for apple crumble and peanuts for boboetie — Boer meatloaf (consumed by Maoris on banks of Australian inland river). Minimum quantity of sliced bread. Pinned list to wall. What was missing? The most urgent item never got written down. Like defining the essence of anything. Work. Place. Life.

  Brushed egg yolk over risen rolls, and into the oven with them. Mentally rehearsed dinner menu. Grabbed the broom and swept the place out. Squirted Spray’N’Wipe on surfaces, scrubbed down with Chux. Realigned condiments on dining table and emptied dented baked bean tin used as ashtray, dislodging a yellow cigarette butt stuck there for days.

  Payoff from previous night’s preparation: peeled potatoes ready to go. Tea-time pumpkin ready. Exhalation of breath. Still only ten a.m. — time stretching. Lazy thoughts inspired by crusty smell filling kitchen.

  Whipped rolls from oven. Tipped onto cooling rack. Tossed aside apron.

  Stepped from the kitchen and strolled back to shed taking more leisurely look at river this time. River always drawing the eye. River possessed by the eye.

  Thoughts of the cook: something forgotten again — the dinner-time pudding. Remembered Lenny arriving halfway through the job at Leopardwood Downs, eyeing pineapple rings in the salad: ‘That all the pudding you got, Cookie?’ He hated him for that. Then started to like him. Now they were mates. Here at Gograndli, Lenny ate nothing but pudding at midday. That was his thing at present. One and a half tins of chilled fruit, an opened carton of UHT cream, dish of red jelly, half a bread and butter pudding (made with mixed fruit), Spotted Dog on the side. Thought about custard to make at last minute.

  Spotted Dog was made with flour, spices, dripping and sugar, studded with currants and boiled in a tea-towel like Christmas pudding. It was eaten hot with cream and custard or spread with butter and eaten cold at smoko.

  Put the hotplate on to warm,
and ambled outside. Couldn’t believe it was true. Biggest chunk of the day’s work done, and remaining chores clear in the mind: get dinner, make afternoon smoko, check ‘donk’, do washing-up, put two legs of mutton in oven for tea, deliver afternoon smoko to shed. Go for walk? Lie down? Read? Flake?

  Could think of that now. The escape into another dimension.

  With ten minutes to spare he grabbed pile of washing from cook’s room, strolled round to laundry, did cold-water wash, noticing, as the view across bare dirt to two-doored dunny came closer, that new toilet rolls were needed. Back in kitchen added items to list, washed hands, turned up gas under hotplate, put potatoes on, opened peas, took salad items from fridge, returned to hotplate — a blackened Barbecues Galore steel plate on four legs, with drip hole for fat, leading down into piece of galvanized pipe sealed at one end.

  Art of frying chops was to get the outside colour right — dark, crisp, unburnt, retaining juices. Trimmed fat during cooking. Leisurely spending of time, standing there pushing sizzling chops around. Three minutes to twelve and all was ready, a last straighten of dinner items, a quick wipe-down of the table, an ear tuned for the shed and the dying away of the engine. Got rid of apron, made tea, and was found idling against a bench as the team trooped in, filling the wide kitchen with elbows and shoulders.

  ‘This looks good.’

  ‘Eh, chops.’

  ‘You’re spoiling us, Cookie.’

  He glanced up from the tattered pages of an old book as if in surprise.

  ‘Look at im. Nothing to do. Loafing round all day reading.’

  YORK AND QUINN

  Two men his age came to the shed, and he thought, these could have been me. Couldn’t they?

  Why not?

  York had gone to school upriver from Bourke. They compared stories. They had watched the same floodwaters go past forty years before. They had floated sticks, crossed over to the opposite bank in flat-bottomed tin boats hauled hand over hand on ropes, and pulled catfish from mud pools. They thought they had even competed in the same interschool sports, the kids from York’s town arriving in Bourke on the back of a truck — a shearing contractor’s truck with bench seats on either side. The girls wore belted tunics and sandshoes without socks, while the boys, barefooted, wore collarless shirts, knee-length itchy felt trousers and braces. Maybe York was the fat ginger-headed boy at the boundary who could never get to the ball before anyone else. Just as, if York thought about it, he would remember a skinny Bourke misfit bowled for a duck, who lost himself in daydreams inspired by ant beds while he was supposed to be fielding. You were the way you were as an adult because you were connected to the way you were as a child. Either you played variations on the connections until they became intricate as notes in music, or you sat in the corner where you had begun, and you sucked your thumb.

  Down there in the Riverina among Kiwis York was wide-eyed, suspicious — out of context like a possum in daylight. ‘The Kiwis have ruined their own country by doing what they’re doing here. They don’t want to be there any more,’ he muttered. His thick red hair was combed to the top of his head like a boxing glove. He kept a comb in his back pocket and took it out many times a day, running it backwards with a familiar angling of the wrist, while darting his neutered tomcat eyes around, checking on work practices. The style-setting moment of York’s life was when he went to Sydney to work in the wool stores when he was eighteen, and became a bodgie. He had come back and got married at twenty-one. Between then and now he was always a union man, he fitted in. ‘It was good enough for our fathers, it is good enough for us.’ Now he was nudging fifty. Once in his home town a priest said to a young boy, ‘Now there’s this other young fellow coming here and he’s going to be an altar boy, do you know him?’ And the young boy said, ‘Yes father. I do. His father scabbed in ’56.’

  York had a memory like that. ‘All us people who stand by the union and stand by all those rights that have been won for us originally, we are being discriminated against because we are staying to our old times and these scabs are coming in and they’re working any times and for any money, and in the long run it just has to ruin the whole shearing industry.’

  York was the replacement presser. Mack was down with blood poisoning. Harold required him to pen up as well. York said he would have words with Clean Team Alastair about that. Apart from trudging back and forth with armloads of wool and heaving them into the press, York was expected to leap the railings and disappear back into the gloomy depths of the shed and chase sheep up, just so these import shearers and professional scabs could increase the amount of wool he had to press, making his day a lot harder. There should be another person employed to do that, believed York. I’m going to have words with Alastair, I am.’ It was the same thing Davo had said at Leopardwood Downs. Except Davo had said it with a biting, feisty exasperation, while York whinged.

  ‘Davo?’ said York, his chunky head swivelling around and his eyes narrowing at the mention of the name. ‘Tall skinny weed of a bloke? Originally from Victoria? Married to a classer?’

  He nodded. ‘They’re friends of mine.’

  ‘They still work for Alastair, do they?’ York offered him a cigarette. Usually it was the other way around. York looked animated. ‘I have a mate who’ll be interested to hear that Davo’s still in circulation. He’s been tracking that Davo for a year. Davo wants to watch out. He might find he has an accident some time, like the steering gear will go on his ute or something.’

  ‘What’s your mate’s problem?’

  ‘Davo belted him with a length of wood, and my mate owes him one.’

  York stayed in his room until mealtime, and when the meal was over he went back to his room and lay down again. Okay, he was tired from the physical effort because he hadn’t worked in a while. But it was as if he wanted to stay out of sight in case anyone he knew caught him there, working in a non-Australian shed in Australia. He felt like a traitor. It was an agonising problem he had to sort through, and it gave him a worried frown. And he knew it would be too much for him, in the end. York had worked through agonising problems before, and got nowhere. York was a sleeper: he couldn’t change. He was still back in a time when the sheds were a hierarchy of men and the only dark people around were no bother. Australian blacks and certainly the odd white Kiwi, Maori too, they always had them with them. But they fitted in, then, and didn’t move round in controlled teams. If Abos worked in the sheds they kept to themselves, or were as if they were white, and pitied their own people, and rightly so. (Not the way they were in York’s town now, drunk, thieving, stirring.)

  York didn’t bother coming out of his room one day when a loud, excited voice started shouting from near the washroom:

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ, come and look at this, will you, everyone, hey!’

  People poured out. The overseer from his hut, the other shearers from their rooms, the cook from the kitchen, the station hand from his propped farmbike, where he was flirting with Rosie and Louella. They came too, wondering, ‘What’s this guy onto now?’ and Sadie crawled out belly-flat from under the quarters’ floorboards and started yapping.

  A handsome barefoot man wearing a Hawaiian shirt, holding his beltless shearing denims up with one hand was dancing outside the washroom. That was Quinn.

  ‘Look, can you believe this, look!’

  What so amazed Quinn was the commonest sight in Australia — a line of ants. There were tens of thousands of them in a well-defined swathe about thirty centimetres across, each ant as big as a broken match and each like the next ant identical, every darn one of them made up of black dumbbells of body connected by amber joiners and supplied with delicate constantly-feeling feet and jaws like a baby crab’s. They came out of a crevice in the crumbling wash-house wall and they disappeared into nowhere under the overseer’s hut.

  The crowd drifted away. ‘Ain’t he seen an ant before? We don’t believe it.’

  Well, he hadn’t. Not like these. ‘Shit a brick, they’re carrying food,
look at this, Cookie, they’ve got rice, bread, sugar, tea — the little mongrels are doing themselves proud.’ They were a wonder of the world to Quinn, whose head jerked back as his eyes followed a gush of parrots low overhead, ‘The fucking colours knock you out!’ he exclaimed.

  All clean, Quinn arrived in the kitchen with his tobacco tin and his papers, and after poking around in the food boxes to discover where the ants were getting in, he found himself a perch near the stove where he was out of the cook’s way (he thought), and spent the last half-hour or so before tea yarning and smoking.

  ‘Now look at this bottle here,’ says Quinn, twirling vinegar in his hand. ‘It has a sort of a horse on the label, a unicorn. Look at these matches. Redheads. How about that. And the boot polish, Kiwi, eh? Defiance flour, that’s an interesting name. Aeroplane jelly. Podrova stock powder, is that widely known in Australia? See here, it’s made in Yugoslavia.’

  One day Quinn brought in a bunch of herbage. ‘Taste this, Cookie. Interesting, eh? I was talking to the cocky and he told me it’s what the sheep eat. Not at all unpleasant, salty, not too bitter, dry.’

  He was always gathering wildflowers.

  Quinn at forty-nine had an ex-wife and a grown-up family of sons (he passed around rugby photos). He’d recently broken up with his girlfriend in the South Island; she was a shearers’ cook and hotel cook. She used to do up the two legs at once. Have the shoulders boned out, roll and stuff them. She was only twenty-three years old. Quinn said his mates used to say it proved the mathematicians wrong: forty-seven into twenty-three would go. Quinn himself had been a cook for a stretch, along with much else. ‘Fourth cook in the Auckland Travelodge.’ At the age he was, the same age as Cookie, Quinn had left the country of his birth for the first time. He caught the plane to Adelaide and the bus to Broken Hill, where Harold collected him in the Hi-Lux at the weekend and brought him down to the shed. It was a typical transition from New Zealand. With sheds organised Harold or Clean Team Alastair bundled workers into cars and hurtled them through the night. Maoris were a travelling people. Headlights revealed ghostly boomers drifting up to the side windows and if they were lucky, flicking away. Sometimes they hit. Crammed in the back seat were eighteen year old girls from Napier, ageing men from Timaru, mid-twenties married couples from Whanganui. Like Christian T and Pam at Leopardwood Downs they’d studied maps but couldn’t believe it was a two- or three-day drive to Sydney or the Gold Coast. They woke up in strange places: couldn’t believe those places. The doors of the rooms opened on flatness. Earth was red, sky pale, then molten. Grass had never been invented. It was a furnace in the middle of the night. The birdcalls were weird. Insects crawled on the skin. Snakes were a nightmare. Foxes howled like madwomen. There was no local town.