Shearers' Motel Read online

  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 tele
graph 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.

  It didn’t happen that way. He put the sun over his left shoulder (where it felt wrong), and tacked along the line of his shadow. The self that betrayed him was also his rescuer. (He wished it could always be this way.) He pushed aside a thorny bush. The sandhill where the emus disappeared stared him in the face. He turned his head. There was the same old piece of fenceline. He cupped an ear, catching the steady throb of the compressor-engine at the woolshed. An easy walk and he was back there.

  On the banks of the Darling, it was impossible to get lost. But when he looked over the grey bands of trees towards Gumbank shed — where the shed should have been — he heard nothing. The steady chug of the engine came from almost behind him. The river had twisted him round. Angling an ear, he located the sound exactly, and then, stepping clear of the trees, caught glimpses of tin roofs across the bare open spaces beyond the river. He set a course back to the shearers’ quarters in a straight line. Minutes from the riverbank, he rose onto an old flood terrace, then another. Red earth-lines along the horizon to the east. A paddock of harsh herbage. Lignum in the hollows. The river barely existing any more — just a strip of trees slipping lower behind with every step. A walk of fifty minutes out, along the meanders, became thirteen back in a straight line. Dull pewter of galvanised roofs and he was soon into the shower, then back in the kitchen, turning the roast, stirring the soup, the evening full of chores till eight o’clock.

  He sat at the mess-table making notes for tomorrow’s cooking. ‘Jobs for Tuesday: Anzac biscuits, pizza bread, cook roast leg for cold, cook pig, cook shoulder for mincing.’ He noted down a tip for future reference: short-bread biscuits made with custard powder, flour, and rendered mutton fat. He munched one himself. The vanilla in the custard powder counteracted the dripping flavour. Rock music filled the laneway from outdoor speakers. Whine of the grinding wheel came from the overseer’s bedroom. Growl of dogs under the floorboards. Remembrance of Sadie with an ache of emotion.

  Harold came in, unpacked his briefcase to do the night’s bookwork. ‘What a racket out there!’ Arnie ambled in, made a cup of tea, slouched at the table smoking through his missing front teeth, sighing, picking tobacco from his tongue. Cookie looked up from recipe books. Asked Arnie his Maori name. It was a mile long. Learned that as far back as Arnie’s family knew, there was no European in his ancestry.

  Without a change of pace or facial expression (as he thought) he switched from making food notes to writing an impression of his surroundings. ‘Arnie and Harold in the mess-room.’ Thought he was getting away with something. Had been lost from work today. Was lost from it again, trying to fix an impression of things that were always changing, lives that were changing at random, apparently, while a pattern of life hovered above their existence and drew them on to the next hope, the next shed.

  Harold raised his eyes to the ceiling and soliloquised: ‘It must be good being a writer — knowing things. Working in this job has taken me all the way back to school. I’m learning how to bank. My wife’s learning how to bank. I’m learning how to fill out diaries. I’m learning how to write records. I’m learning how to do a filing system. It’s amazing, the things that you’ve got to know to live. Just the basics, and if you can get the basics right — I know that from playing my sport — everything just keeps flowing. Oh, gee, it’s been hard work, though. Hard work.’

  A DOOR OPENS

  There were more ways than one of being lost. He had learned that in this work.

  Imagine living in a garbage can — call it a back-yard flat. Imagine coming out clinking bottles and spitting blackened lettuce leaves when there’s a knock at the door — call it a lid. Imagine having flies and vegetable gnats buzzing around — imagine being a young derro wearing a torn T-shirt, stained jeans, a pair of shoes from the op shop with splits down the sides and the stink of something inside. Woolly furry rat’s nest smell, the feet of mother’s baby — all ten wonderful toes slithering in slime. Imagine living in this shithouse with broken glass, boot-holes in fibro, mattresses with cigarette burns and stinking of piss. You’d do anything, go anywhere to get away from there. Imagine being thrown away at some previous time, but ending up there, always at the same place, downwind of the dump, ‘Tip View flats’ jokers called it — with bread wrappers and supermarket bags stuck on the fences, clogging the windows, headaches all the time from the fires always burning, dogs and cats sneaking aro
und, covered in sores. Night-time explosions of bursting glass to keep you awake. The town with backstreets you wouldn’t shit in. It would be as if you were made of plastic if you lived there. As if you were trash. As if you would explode yourself one of these nights.

  Imagine spending your life hanging around railway stations and bus stations: ‘Ay mate, spare us a dollar? I’m really ‘ungry.’ Or, ‘I’ve just come down from da bush, and me car run out of petrol, can you give us a dollar?’ Imagine no one caring if you never washed. Imagine having cock-cheese in your hair, pus in your ear-holes, blood in your nostrils. Imagine being so filthy no one wanted you — the natural state, kids running away from you, a hairy spider coming round the corner. Imagine no one ever showing you the way. Imagine not belonging to anyone, having nowhere to go.

  Imagine being young derro.

  Now imagine this for a change: in the doorway stands a skinny smiling old guy in a blue shirt and tie, moleskin trousers, elastic sided riding boots and burnt-looking eyeballs. The true Aussie farmer. This one must have gone bust to be running after shit for pay. He’s a shearing contractor. He’s come to find someone, lifting the lid on the garbage, so to speak. And he says he wants you. He says, You’ll do. It’s work in a shearing shed picking up wool. The owner is a trusted client. Gotta do the right thing by him. He stares you right in the face, young derro, and smiles. ‘What’s this got to do with a bloke?’ Let’s have a beer and discuss it. Young derro has no power left in his liver, can’t touch the stuff no more, only drinks Fanta and plays pool with the Abos, he likes their society. Let’s go round in the saloon bar, away from them coons, the bloke says.