Shearers' Motel Read online

  THE VULCAN

  Climbing from the truck and checking landmarks on the way to Mount Vulcan station was like watching a speeded-up movie of weather patterns. Herringbone shreds of stratus broke and dived through the tops of Monterey cypress windbreaks. Drizzle whipped and streamed across the windscreen, reducing visibility to a smear. The tonneau cover, protecting cooking gear and cardboard cartons of food in the back, held a million pinpoint droplets that sagged while the truck idled, forming sheets of heavy, sloshing water.

  It was the first day of a new job and he felt depressed about starting. Depression usually hit him much later, about halfway through the second week, when there seemed no beginning or end to anything, no travel or change on offer, just four greasy walls and grey soap scum on the kitchen windows (if there was glass). It was new bringing a feeling of desolation along so early on the ride. Here on the road to Mount Vulcan there was no clear view of anything.

  It was a day for crawling under the covers and sleeping, for sitting on a barstool and eventually crashing. The temptation was to kick the station gate without opening it at all, to execute a U-turn, to piss off without telling anyone, like a cook named Fatty Gill he heard about. He was a master pie-maker in a former life. People said, ‘There wasn’t one shed he started that he didn’t pull the pin on the night before’. The overseer would arrive at the shed, and Fatty would turn up tired from driving, and drunk. ‘Well, they can get stuffed,’ he would say, ‘I’m leavin’. I’ll unload the car and I’ll go.’ And the overseer would say, ‘Well, look Fatty, you’ve driven a long way and you’re tired. How about leaving in the morning. Just have a bit of sleep, old mate, you’ll be right. And I’ll wake you up in the morning.’ So in the morning the overseer would get up, and go and wake Fatty, and say, ‘Well, Fatty, the fire’s going, are you ready?’ And Fatty would say, ‘Yes, matey, I’m right.’

  A sudden squall grabbed him on the roadside. He examined the flapping piece of paper Harold had handed him weeks before — his directions. There was supposed to be a quarry nearby, an extinct volcano, a small pine forest. But there was just this turn-off in the mist. It was all he could see, except for sheep packed into tightly-fenced paddocks munching wet grass and sending sprays of water flying when they shook themselves. There would be no shearing tomorrow unless the owner had shedded enough sheep before the rain started. All day it would be like a traffic jam in the shearers’ quarters. The kitchen would fill with damp, heavy bodies, cans of beer propped everywhere, mud being dragged in, dogs nosing around, ghetto blasters carried underarm at full volume — an easy-going, undirected, bored, intrusive population reeking of human endeavour on hold, convinced that the cook was having a day as light as they were, especially if he let them fry up a few eggs and chops and bacon for themselves, the jostle of elbows keeping him from his unending chores.

  The directions mentioned an old house and there it was: a chunk of black-stained limestone like a prison or a morgue behind a hedge of wild briar. Chains clanked mournfully from somewhere. A Doberman pinscher rushed out while he was wondering if these might be the shearers’ quarters. Anything was possible. Small slits of windows peered from under the eaves. Outhouses were knotted in ivy. There was long grass everywhere. Twenty people plus extras piling in, day after day, would use up the oxygen.

  Only it wasn’t it. The wind slanted round more. A gate appeared ahead. A white crushed-gravel track led through paddocks of clover. This was a rich man’s place, but there was a stink in the air like boiled meat, a steamy, frothy odour. It came from a meatworks on the boundary of the property. When he stopped he heard the hiss of pressure hoses carried by the breeze, panicky bellows, kicks of metal that might have been the sound of a pneumatic killing hammer, a repetitive, implacable donk. Bertram Junior and others he knew had worked in abattoirs when they were teenagers, tramping about in gumboots and bloodstained aprons, becoming skilled with knife and steel, witnessing sudden, passionate attacks at the boning tables between men and women, wordless lunges and twists of rapier-thin boning knives, moments of tragedy witnessed with shining, brown, all-seeing, ever-remembering eyes.

  The shearing shed appeared from the misty rain at the end of a long paddock. Harold had described it as a heritage shed, a word he thought would entice Cookie to the Mount Vulcan job, because he had liked the old sheds they had worked at. His imagination ran overtime with images of Dickensian decrepitude, fat on the floor thick enough to skate on, floorboards sloping away at an angle steep enough to send tin cans rolling out of reach whenever they were dropped.

  Now he saw it — materialising through the mist like an exhibition pavilion, a school hall or Victorian era concert venue — the Mount Vulcan shed, looking unlike anywhere else. Speeding clouds parted for a few moments and sunlight raked across the high limestone walls, which looked delicate, insubstantial, rose-coloured against the intense green paddocks in the soggy afternoon light. When the sky darkened from a passing cloud the walls slickered to silver, solidifying like something found in nature, water-eroded, lichen-textured, monumental, depressing, earth-rooted. It was a shed that seemed to have been built with something greater in mind than the factory routines of wool-taking — despite the twelve rectangular holes lining the long near wall, the twelve shearing chutes, the twelve counting pens, the many old sheets of galvanised iron nailed over unused work positions to keep out the wind — and the sheep yards battered and wired together, straggly and forlorn in the drizzle.

  Without looking behind him he accelerated onto a line of puggy fresh wheel-tracks leading straight to the back door. He wanted to know if meat had been killed ready for him. He was insane to know this after previous disappointments, excuses, blank looks, outright refusals.

  A farm vehicle was nosed up to the steps of the shed. Someone was inside. On the high end wall the date 1870 was chiselled in the stone. The whine of an electric drill started up. It was the same sound cooks inevitably heard the day before shearing across the whole stretch of the country, in every rough make-do shed knocked together with branches and tree trunks and sheets of galvanised iron. He looked in, said hello, introduced himself. The place was empty of sheep. The lofty ceiling was orange with dusty light and cobwebbed red-gum struts.

  ‘So you got here, Cookie,’ said an elderly station hand. ‘They thought you wasn’t coming this time.’

  He looked out into a muddy yard and saw a rusty-roofed meat house with two carcases hanging in it.

  ‘Is that our meat?’ he pointed.

  ‘Yep. One’s for the station. The other one’s yours — when you want it.’

  He felt a surge of gratitude that someone had bothered to anticipate his arrival. He went out to the truck and glanced in the direction he should have looked as he drove in — up a shallow grass gully to the misty skyline. Hoops of drizzle bowled from the south. There was a rainbow aureole where the sun should have been. Sheets of limestone glistened in the grass. A broad, low building squatted on a piece of flatland against the sky. It was like an English cottage, made of limestone blocks, a turn-of-the-century villa in a pioneer housing estate, maybe, that only needed thatch, instead of galvanised iron, to take it out of Australia and work-life. So that was the shearers’ quarters — woodheap and meat house and clothesline and dented parked car told the story. Washing flapped like torn sails in the wind. A ribbon of chimney-smoke blew across the grass. About a hundred metres away was a toilet block, also fashioned from limestone, with sheep grazing up to the doors and along the intense green of the septic outlet pipe.

  From a side door a shadowy figure appeared wearing a black bowler hat. It was a man with arms dangling, chin dropped to his chest, his walk like an old man’s, between a trudge and a trot. It was the walk of the long-term shearer.

  He thought it was Harold. But Harold never dressed like that (though he walked that way). At the woodheap this Bowler Hat loaded his arms up, then moved back inside again. As he spun his truck up to the kitchen door on the slippery grass, the figure emerged for a second tim
e — hat tipped back on his black-haired head, eyes hidden behind John Lennon-style dark glasses.

  Someone from the station had left an old sea-trunk in the kitchen full of starched tablecloths and spotlessly clean meat bags. A level of consideration was apparent. A white Toyota truck appeared, and a portly, silver-haired man, perhaps the owner, unrolled empty 44-gallon drums and placed them in position outside bedroom doors. He drove off without coming in to say hello. Each to his own task, he seemed to imply. Good thing too.

  Bowler Hat had disappeared, leaving a blazing fire in the grate in the mess-room, a chess set on the table, and a cowboy novel turned face down on the bench seat.

  In waning light and drizzle Cookie walked back to the shed carrying a freshly washed cotton meat bag under his arm. On the meat house verandah there was a mess — buckets of dog meat, bones, watery blood-clogged saw-dust and fat-smeared saws and selections of bloodied butchers’ knives and a steel. He breathed this mixture of endless kills in through his nostrils, accustoming himself to the stench. It didn’t worry him too much. It was a fixture of the place he could live with, unlike the gluey meatworks’ stench that gusted randomly across the paddocks, taking his guts by surprise.

  Through the gauze of the meat house the two carcases hung on S-hooks. One was smooth, rosy-haunched, chilly-smelling — fit for feasting. The other was blue, skinny, and marked by shreds of torn fat. It looked worse than dogs’ meat: more like a skinned dog. He wanted to take the big one but guessed he’d better not. Drizzle blew in and he stared at water droplets filling random squares of flywire and then disappearing, only to reappear elsewhere on the wire, making a hypnotic pattern in the evening light. His thinking was that shearers were thrown the worst of everything until they complained, and only then were they grudgingly given better. He guessed the station workforce was okay here, and soon they would have all sorts of special arrangements going. But for now he didn’t want to elevate them over the national average.

  He sawed the carcase down the spine, finding that the two sides were light enough for him to carry the whole sheep back to the quarters’ meat house on his shoulder. Because it was split down the middle it kept parting. He slithered in the mud. He was getting his exercise. Bowler Hat watched him coming. Whatever he was thinking he didn’t care — cooks were crazy, the better they were the crazier they were, the crazier they were the more authority they had.

  Back at the quarters, putting the carcase on the chopping block to balance it, he peeled back the meat bag and looked at what he had got. It seemed to have shrunk even more on the way over. It smelt vaguely of ruptured intestines, mashed grass, green faeces. He had been crazy to choose it. If the station people wanted to, he decided, they could eat this and the workers would go vegetarian tonight. He threw it onto the truck and drove it back to the shed in a hurry.

  The station hand was waiting for him on the meat-house verandah, water droplets running down his nose. He said that the sheep Cookie had taken was intended for him and his family.

  Cookie said he wasn’t thinking straight, he’d had a long drive, his mistake.

  His mood lightened. It wasn’t his worry if tonight at the station they would dine on shoulders the size of chicken wings and legs of mutton like shrunken frogs’ haunches, with toothpick-like chops and barbed-wire shanks on the side. There would be a feast in the quarters.

  The station hand lugged out the big rosy carcase, and laid it on the rain-rinsed tonneau cover in a gesture of pride. On the drive back to the cookhouse it gathered beadings of drizzle, like silver frosting.

  Up at the huts tonight there would be a pot of dark, onion-rich stew simmering on the stove. On white plates, chunks of tender meat cubed from weighty legs would shine with a coating of steaming tomato gravy. There would be mashed potatoes, pumpkin, and mushy, salty tinned peas. Only three out of the expected twenty of the team would be there to enjoy it — Bowler Hat, his son Tiny, and Ronald, a seventeen year old Aboriginal rouseabout who had arrived at Bowler Hat’s place one day and stayed on, to be made one of the family, to go wherever Bowler and Tiny went, all over the country. They would eat their meal sitting on chairs in front of Bowler Hat’s blazing fire in the mess-room. Bowler Hat would try to get him to play chess. Rain would pepper the windows and race in cold streaks down the glass, to gather on the window ledge, then ooze inside, and trickle to the floor. Various empty saucepans would be positioned around the floor to catch drips from the roof, and mostly they would stay there for the whole of the shearing, pinging and plopping through innumerable southerly changes.

  That night the stew pot would stay warm on the stove, over a low flame, awaiting the arrival of Harold and the rest of the team who would burst in around midnight, just after he had packed the stores away and got the kitchen ready for the morning, and gone to bed in the thin-walled cook’s room adjoining the kitchen and mess, lying awake there, arms behind his head, fighting sleep, waiting for interruptions.

  The word was out that Harold hadn’t expected him to arrive at Mount Vulcan. Why, was a mystery to him. He could only think it was a ploy aimed at the team and increasing Harold’s pulling power: You mightn’t be getting a cook, fellahs, and then, You’re in luck, I found you one. When they came in, he would hear them talking about him in lowered voices and eating up every last mouthful of what he had left for them, clattering their knives and forks, taking second helpings, stacking plates, belching, yawning. It would be one-thirty before the last of them shambled out, leaving a radio going and the lights switched on.

  STABBER

  At Mount Vulcan the limestone walls of the building were part of the earth, part of what was underneath. Elongated shadows moved as if thrown up from below, and then moved along walls, flickering on window-glass, emerging from lit doorways, flattening on the ground near the woodheap and wash-house, under a low, scudding sky.

  At the back of bedrooms, on grassy paddock verges, strangers arrived in their cars for nights of swigging Jim Beam, smoking dope, and getting together with friends from home — Lenny, Calvin, Louella, Rosie, Bowler Hat, and a man name Boland — flattened faces reflecting flames that leapt from red-gum logs on an open fire in the mist. It was a gypsy encampment there. Harold slept through it. Figures gyrated into the driving drizzle and staggered back again. At a late hour they came into the kitchen wearing fibrous checked jackets and beanies tugged down over their brows, with dufflecoat hoods on their heads, eyes shadowed, mouths emitting steam. Dogs arrived in the doorway eyeing their owners, alert for a word of command — braced tensely on stocky haunches, growling at the backs of their throats, brindle ball-toting Staffordshire terriers and pink-eyed bull terriers with crudely drawn, unfinished lines.

  ‘Whatcha got for us tonight, Cookie?’

  ‘Might be something.’

  He took a tray from the fridge; tipped out a bag of rolls, gone hard since morning; showed where the margarine was, the jam, the sauce; sacrificed the dish of cold chops he was going to reheat for breakfast.

  ‘Ta, you’re a mate.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. You’re welcome.’

  Rosie and Louella sashayed in, saying they had the munchies real bad. Mostly they survived on Bailey’s Irish Cream and smokos, hardly ever appearing for meals — unless it was Rosie at the last minute grabbing a piece of cold toast, a congealed egg, a strip of bacon, and dashing over to the shed holding it for her friend, her footprints echoing on the hollow ground.

  Mount Vulcan Station was riddled with underground chambers. Rivers wound their way in darkness under paddocks of lucerne and forage oats down to the sea. Lakes and pools were down there. People made landing jetties in the last century, and went picnicking in row boats under fencelines and gardens, carrying candles and hurricane lamps through the driving silence. Limestone meant they were able to succumb to impulses they would never admit to by day, feelings they couldn’t put on show. It was what the pools of below-ground darkness allowed them.

  At Mount Vulcan when he walked outside at night and stamped
his boots, grey sheets of rock thudded. It was like knocking on a reverberating skull and releasing the thoughts inside. Indentations in paddocks showed where collapses had happened, where cows had fallen in, where tractors and haymaking equipment had disappeared, and farm hands had made their last exits.

  He imagined when he put his ear to the ground he could hear the roar of partying from the Crossroads Hotel four kilometres away, where shearers drank with slaughtermen and lamb markers with shed hands, where girl rousies played pool with bikies, and queued for the payphone to ring their boyfriends in other towns, and on Saturday nights danced and ate the seafood smorgasbord while their cook drove into town and took a bed at Jens Hotel.

  Late at night, in the cook’s room, where he slept on a mattress on the floor, he believed he could hear the slam of car doors underneath him, the spin of tyres on gravel passing below, the rumble of shearers’ traffic that would soon rake headlights up the whitewashed walls. This was the honeycombed earth of Mount Vulcan supplying meaning. Shed life was a river of change, channelled by grey masses of earth, hitting walls, switching direction, roaring, sinking, spiralling, narrowing, choking out. And finally filtering to the sea.

  The quarters had a low door and a gloomy, widening-out interior. He sensed difficult presences as people entered and stood at the far end. They talked among themselves. He found himself imagining plots, subterfuges, hostilities, as he rattled pots and pans — all because of something going on inside himself that he couldn’t see, something buried, shapeless, and hidden from his understanding of himself.

  He didn’t want to be there. He had felt this from the front gate. He wanted to be back in places that had offered full satisfaction for what he was doing — Mudbank, Leopardwood Downs, Gograndli, Wilga. They were idealised locations to him now. He had survived the gamut from first comer to known quantity by passing through their gates. Wasn’t it enough? He had rounded out a story for himself in those places, flicking through the calendar of possibilities till he reached the torn-off stub of the year at The Vulcan.