Shearers' Motel Read online

  He shouted them burgers in a service station cafe. There would be no more work in the Western Division for a while. ‘I’ll call you when we get a starting date on Wilga Station,’ said Bertram Junior. He went to the phone and called Alastair.

  ‘It’s not raining where he is,’ Bertram Junior reported. ‘I told him you’d be camping in the caravan park on your way through.’

  ‘What made you say that?’

  ‘It’s where you stayed last time,’ said Bertram Junior, wide-eyed, as if everything in life obeyed a single rule, and everyone knew it except this cook.

  AUSTRALIAN SHED

  He could not sleep because he was waiting for a vehicle to enter the gravel drive of the caravan park in the pearly pre-dawn light, and soon enough it came, the nose-heavy roo-barred Fairlane he had seen before—last time with Lenny at the wheel and Rosie asleep on the back seat, and Flash hanging out of the passenger window, giving him the thumbs-up as it sped away from Leopardwood Downs in a storm of dust.

  Only this time the driver was a gaunt sixtyish man in a creased white shirt, wearing a Wool Board tie, and with eyes like chipped stones.

  He was fully dressed and expecting this, stumbling from his tent and meeting his call to a shed, shaking a thin dry hand through the window of the car, the uncanny habit of Clean Team Alastair being to pluck his workers from pubs, motels, railway hotels, roadside motels, men’s homes, riverbanks and municipal caravan parks. He saw men at mass and got them there. Also from the gutters. Today he got a small dog as well, Sadie, willing to go anywhere because she was there already in her heart.

  ‘Have you ever worked as a rouseabout, Cookie?’

  ‘I’m too old for it.’

  ‘You’re never too old for anything. Guess my age.’

  ‘Sixty?’

  Alastair snorted. ‘Try seventy.’

  Alastair first ran the station Topper for the present owner’s father, he said on the drive out, sitting on one hundred and twenty, floating above potholes and ricocheting off cattle ramps.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘I needed someone for the day, and you’re it.’

  Clouds hugged the western horizon in a long dark band. Sadie still smelt of black soil although she looked clean. He combed her coarse coat with his fingertips and decided he would die at this speed. It was better if he had something to concentrate on. ‘With all this rain we’re going to have to be lucky to get back. I’m bog-shy.’

  ‘The growers are jumpy because they’re moving into the autumn shearing, hoping for and hoping against. They’re only happy if it rains dollar coins.’

  He looked sideways at Alastair and saw a man who probably owned a piece of dirt somewhere.

  Alastair looked sideways at him and saw someone he’d heard all about. This was the bloke who was out there shuttling around with his Kiwis—‘Making notes all the time, they tell me. What’s the aim?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Articles?’ Alastair insisted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A book on the industry—that’s what we need, something about our best men. Blueprint for the future. A fella like you could do it.’

  ‘I’m a different sort of writer.’

  They travelled along in silence for a while, having nothing to say to each other, nothing much in common. He understood that when it came to writers, Alastair liked books that boosted things, that got behind things. That had a purpose relatable to an organised life. Annual reports and company histories, wool prospects, bush yarns, Macca on a Sunday morning, a book of Footrot Flats if he wanted a belly laugh, though really by preference he would rather play through a fistful of audio cassettes: Slim Dusty, Chad Morgan, a bush band bawling shearing songs while he made one of his all-night drives somewhere.

  ‘I hear you run a good kitchen,’ Alastair gave up.

  When they arrived at Topper Station Alastair went to the boot of the car and put on a grey dust coat.

  ‘After a while I’ll pull Iain off the board and you can take over.’

  ‘Look, I said I couldn’t do it,’ he said.

  ‘It ain’t hard,’ said Alastair, staring with an insomniac’s gaze. ‘Just watch Iain, he’s one of the best. He’s that dark fella.’

  The shed stood among scattered ironbarks beside an eroded gully. The homestead was a tin-roofed cottage surrounded by car wrecks. There was blond grass at the end of summer, a gate squeaking open at the house, and children with schoolbags on their backs walking up a hillside, calling faintly to each other, disappearing over the rise.

  ‘Timeless is the word I always use for Topper,’ said Alastair, loosening his tie. ‘I do this every year; drop everything, and head on out. I thank the Lord I can manage. But today I need to be in at the bank round eleven, so I’ll finish on the wool table come smoko. That’ll give you two hours to work it out. Most new rousies don’t even have that much time.’

  ‘I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Besides, they’re only crutching today. It’s easy.’

  Alastair introduced him around. Four shearers and a rouseabout. This was his first all-Australian shed, he realised, if he didn’t count the shearings on his own farm, which were more like family affairs, with Sharon’s same two shearers, Neville and Dennis, year after year. In an all-Australian shed (if Topper Station was anything to go by) there was a tight, hard feeling, a sense of a groove worn down over time and an unforgiving routine without much flexibility. Two of the workers, Iain and Hector, were Aborigines. Hector was quiet and self-contained, and was the gun—he oiled his handpiece and said he would do seven hundred today. Iain was the rouseabout: heavily built, wearing a football jumper, and with a hawk nose and barrel chest. He was ready for work. Yesterday he had a job putting up a circus tent in town. Tomorrow he’d shoulder his guitar and go back to country and western singing. ‘You take what you can find.’

  ‘I seen him perform at the Charleville Golf Club once,’ said Alastair. ‘Smoky, they call him, Iain Smoky McNeill and the Warrego River Boys. He’s a knockout, chum.’

  Iain made it look easy as he cruised along the board gathering up wool. It was possible to define an Australian style and a Kiwi style by methods of rousing. Laconic, stoic, enduring: Iain was born to what the landscape asked of people. His lope was made for long-distance travelling over a wide plain, but then, at every return to the wool table, Iain was still, and seemed to have endless time to talk. There wasn’t the racing dartingness and hands-on-hips harried breathing of the Kiwi women, who worked as if they were swimming out from a shoreline, gathering necessities. They were two different styles of landscape. ‘Do you know the Carnarvon Ranges, Cookie? Did you ever see the coffins in the trees there? That’s my ancestral home. My Dad was a horsebreaker, and that was how I made my start, till a horse landed on top of me and I done my spine.’

  Hector made the sweat fly down his end. He used a piece of oil-soaked wool on the floor as a resting point for the teeth of his handpiece. He crutched three sheep to the other men’s two. His head swung around every time a yell came from outside. One of the station hands was drenching sheep in the counting pens, and calling to his dog, ‘Come back here you black cunt!’

  Hector seemed to do a count of five, and then get back into it.

  ‘Who says blackfellas don’t like work?’ said Alastair, in an aside. It was nine-thirty, smoko time. Alastair wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, removed his dust coat and folded it over his arm, and asked Iain to take over on the wool table. ‘I’ll be back round knock-off time to write the cheques.’

  Hijacked. He hadn’t seriously thought this would happen. Pulled from the pattern he’d settled on, and been given the rabbit-chop of work. Hot, dusty, non-stop. Blisters. Dodging sheep and shearers. And it was only crutching, nothing complicated or demanding, just go, wool cut from the hindquarters to make for cleaner lambing ewes, a quick blow above the eyes, and a push down the chute into daylight. Next one up. Catch the escaped one. Where’s that Cookie? He can’t do it fast enough, and Hector was al
ways standing on a piece of wool every time he came back that end. Not them. Bits of pure hot sheepshit held together by a few strands of fibre. They went into woolpacks nailed to the wall. Iain stood skinny legs apart at the wool table, looking relaxed, talking about football to the tail-end shearer, a bantam South Australian.

  ‘What fellow position you play?’

  ‘Front row.’

  ‘Is that gogang talk?’

  Lunchtime. He was still running in his mind as the others asked him where he’d been, who he knew in the industry.

  The South Australian expressed an opinion: ‘Maoris are rock apes’. Also, referring to Sadie: ‘Them little dogs are just women shit’. He didn’t like women in the sheds. He had a mate who shore alongside one once. ‘He’s shearing the sheep and she pulls her T-shirt off. No bra. He runs the handpiece into his arm while he’s reaching up to pull out the gear and gets nineteen stitches.’

  Late afternoon, the station hand called his dog a black cunt one time too many and Hector set down his handpiece and went around to the door, leant out into the day: ‘Hey, keep the colour out of it, mate. Call him Dusty or something, but not black.’

  The dog ran away down the track.

  ‘See, he doesn’t like you any more.’

  ‘Come back, Nigger,’ called the station hand.

  HEART BY THE FIRE

  The approaches through the paddocks were carpeted with smashed bulrushes and uprooted willows. Skeins of silvery water from the saturated ground channelled the low parts. Ruts scarred the track, the creekbank was scoured, and paddocks of flattened clover went downside up. The causeway leading to the house was washed under, leaving dangling gaps of reinforced concrete. He drove carefully across, nosing forward and touching the brakes, getting out to check that the load of goods in the mud-heavy truck wasn’t too much. He still had the carryover stores from Gograndli Station in the back. He calculated he’d made a round trip of two thousand kilometres with them.

  ‘What did you bring me?’ demanded Irene, pulling at his arm and wanting to be piggybacked everywhere. He produced an orange bin-liner bulging with uneven shapes while Sharon laughed at his dog: Sadie was sleeker and dumpier than when she had left, leaning back on her haunches and accepting the tribute of hands to lick and fingers to entangle her ears. ‘You’ve looked after her.’

  He upended the garbage bag on the verandah table, spilling out parrot feathers, wildflowers, a bleached bird’s skull, worn shards of green bottle glass, bits of iron pyrites and a knuckle of hardened clay with a twist of crumbly opal running through. He spread handfuls of different-coloured stones across the tabletop. They came from the mortar of the broken-down chimney-place at the ruined homestead. He described the feeling of the place at night. ‘The strange thing was that once I was there, I didn’t want to be on my own.’

  ‘And now?’

  Any idea of belonging didn’t mean settling down, in any way he could express.

  ‘I’m booked for a place called Wilga Station,’ he confessed awkwardly. ‘I’ve given a definite yes. They’ll call when the roads dry out. Maybe in a fortnight.’

  He pulled muddy, crumpled cheques from his wallet. They didn’t come to much. It was the same as ever. His cooking wages were being eaten up by petrol costs and running repairs, and Clean Team Alastair had dodged paying the full rates for his rouseabouting at Topper Station. He must have decided it was good experience for him or something. (He took it on the chin.)

  He went back to the ritual of storytelling around the dining table, conjuring a picture of shed life as before, the weeks lived under the tin roofs and in the smoky, fat-rancid kitchens. This time the story was different, though. He couldn’t make it as smooth. He stumbled on the rough bits, the inner turmoil he’d felt at Gograndli Station. The story of setting fire to the kitchen, what did that mean?

  It was easier to turn aside, making a half-joke of everything, and have Sadie tell her story—there by the open fire on the shiny, painted wood floor, with her tough pink belly-tits showing, and a cream of dogspittle emerging at the corners of her rubbery black lips.

  Me? I’ve never been away. He took me nowhere. I was always where I am. Look at me here. Heart by the fire. Paws on the rug. The flame singing.

  The first frosts arrived. The days were clear and despite their cold starts, hot later. Reptiles that had started hibernation came briefly to life again: stumpy-tailed lizards ploughed through poplar leaves, tiger snakes basked on sandy reaches, and up behind the house, from a neat round hole in the roots of a ribbon gum, a fat red-bellied black snake oozed out into the pasture, where it uncoiled itself and lay still while a mob of sheep stalked past.

  Sadie found it there. She adopted her attack stance: struck. The snake thrashed and she elevated her head, angling her chubby shoulders for a look. The snake whipped around her in a black spiral. She pranced like a little pony. He watched the snake’s head, but it never seemed to strike. He tried to hit Sadie with a stick, but she wasn’t engaged with him.

  Then Sadie and the snake were rolling in the grass, lost in battle and pausing, for a moment, emblematically as if for a last stamping into memory — Sadie with her head cocked back, the snake with its flattened neck arched and its tongue darting like a shadow.

  A snap of jaws and the snake fell loose with its back broken. It lay with its head raised, eyes alive in the sunlight.

  He grabbed Sadie and ran with her down to the house, where he turned a hose on her to wash off any venom.

  She ran around. Played with a stick. She was okay.

  Except it was time for him to drive Sharon to Tarago to catch the train to Sydney. He waited until it was almost too late to get there, and Sadie was still okay, he could see that—gutsy, bright-eyed, herself.

  When he arrived back two hours later he whistled to her as he walked up the path and she didn’t respond. He called her name and she stayed where she was. He found her lying in her cardboard box on the verandah, on her bed of jute sacking, already stiff and cold.

  3

  DRIVING ACROSS THE SKY

  THE LIGHTS OF WILGA

  It was close to midnight. The truck moved across the warm darkness of western New South Wales with the stealth of a glow-worm.

  Sheep appeared and scattered and reappeared. They stood staring from a rise, all heads aligned along the same aiming point, eyes in the sweep of headlights like green refracting jewels. Sheep ran along a dry creekbed away from the advancing vehicle, a dirty dusty flow. They limped in single file across the road. Lone ones staggered.

  Owls, grasshoppers, bats, moths and flying ants made traceries in the dark.

  The night breathed.

  Returned among stands of gidgee and leopardwood, he moved through pale clearings of Mitchell grass and luminous starshine. It was not stupid of him to have come yet again. He had to stop explaining away almost everything and live what he understood. He was on his own now.

  There was a long way to go yet. It was a struggle staying awake, the soft road and comfortable airstream cushioning him like a dream. He switched on the dust-filled radio and a woman’s voice came disembodied from the stars, out from under the dash with its spaghetti of loose wires and sick green interior lighting. He concentrated and listened. The speaker was an archaeologist. Upper Egypt had gone back to desert, she said. Goats and sheep had eaten the place down to the roots and trampled the fragile humus. Before the sands blew in, tomb robbers operated, broaching hoards of treasure and stripping dead royalty of jewels. They came in secret, through darkness at a late hour. They came like locusts devouring, like browsers and grazers, like anyone with a need, a craving, a determined and driven motive to strip until finally nothing worth taking was left. Smoking torches were doused, a rock was rolled over the door, sand drifted in, the air grew thick and stale and nobody entered the tombs for thousands of years, when anything at all, any fragment, any leftover told a story. And there was always something left. Something to take away, said the speaker.

  He understood
this. It was where he came in. The tale of the local lout, the opportunist, the farm worker and the family man challenged the story of kings. A trail of broken stones showed what had been. The throne of painted timbers, the barge of bales, the noble dog on a taut leash. It was all there in the shed life. The pattern of the stars ruling.

  The track to Wilga Station branched and reconstituted itself. The archaeologist added her tracings, he added his, trooping down the gidgee-avenue of late night thoughts, entering past lives and present in imagination or actuality — the night vaulted like a tomb.

  He had never been to Wilga Station. But he knew the kitchen would have nothing left to cheer him, no little luxury or labour-saving implement left intact in the cupboards. No one would have been in to brush the dust out, to clear the sifting sand from the corners, to degrease the pots and pans and give him a break, a welcome, a late hello. That went with the contract, somehow.

  Ghostly other vehicles rode behind him with much the same knowledge — except they knew their cook would be there before them: he’d better be. Theirs was the shearing story beloved by men like Clean Team Alastair. The yarn of the country. Motorbikes poked along. Men walked, came on bicycles, rode horses, pushed wheelbarrows. They came in any number of ways over ten or fifteen decades of Australian life, in moods of dread or renewed anticipation, out of necessity, romance, anger, or organisational zeal. Other writers had come this way too, before he came. All of them trod over what had ruled before, before there were sheep or white men, in this spirit country stretching down into time, past empires of Egypt, and secularised, now, by the economy of sheep.

  The radio faded, cut out. Meanings that had seemed to be forever were shattered, desecrated, traded, pillaged. Stars wheeled across the windscreen and the Cross sank lower in the star-speckled rear-view mirror.