Shearers' Motel Read online

  He picked up the phone and called home. The dial jerked through the numbers, grating on the dust clogging it. He thought he might come out here and live for a while. The sort of house he would live in would have walls made of corrugated iron. The ceiling would be of pressed tin, with a pattern of stylised rosettes. Bench tops and table-tops would be of plastic and vinyl. A framed shearing print would hang on the loungeroom wall, Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams, maybe. The Wanaaring butcher’s calendar, hanging from a picture hook, would show sheep on green pasture with water in the background. It would be just like the mate’s house.

  Sharon answered the phone. They greeted each other with news of what was happening at each end. The way the year was ending for both of them was in a kind of estrangement. There were many things that might have been said, but their conversational routines had become ritualistic on the subject of his being away.

  He suddenly burst out with, ‘Look, I’ve been thinking, what about packing up and coming out here for a while —’

  ‘To the town?’

  ‘Mmm. That’s what I mean.’

  He pictured Sharon taking a breath at the other end of the line, shaking her head, tactfully restraining her amazement. She knew the town — they’d come here years before, she would remember the tiny houses proudly kept up, the concrete front yards, the cactus gardens and pebble lawns, the bizarre proliferation of pubs on every second corner, the dust from the mine tailings choking the lungs, giving small children lead poisoning. And the silent scream of loneliness in the air. She said it was like a town that had been picked up from Mexico or South Africa, spun through space, and dumped among saltbush and sheep. And she knew the work, the shed life, from his many descriptions.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem like much of an idea. I’m not against going somewhere — I’ll try anything. But there — I don’t know. No. I mean no. Can you rethink this, give it some thought? I mean, what you are saying is impossible, can you see that? It is, you know, just this side of absolutely crazy, and it wouldn’t work, you should realise that.’

  When he returned to the hangi it was dark. Out in the yard small kids wandered around in disposable nappies, sucking empty twist-tops in the dirt, hugging the bull terrier that was attached to an iron stake by a long chain, and had a wide studded collar they loved to fondle.

  Rocco swept the dirt back from the edges and revealed the tin. Men lifted the tin back, being careful to avoid dropping dirt in the hole and cursing when a trickle ran in from the side. The beads of moisture on the bags were called mud by Rocco. The baskets were swung up, absolutely plain food steamed in the heat of the ground oven, the chicken falling to pieces at the touch, the pork delicately soft, the mutton a different food altogether from mutton in the sheds, without the same strong, fatty, urinous reek. Rocco said a Maori prayer, and the crowd fell on the food. Each piece seemed to have taken on the quality of the blandest item, making the fish as smooth as potato, the chicken like creamed pumpkin. It rocked people back on their heels, made them thoughtful, interiorised. The mood of the night went on in the same direction. The stones were sunk in gloom in the bottom of the pit. They would be saved for another occasion. The baskets would be put back later with any leftover food, and people would come around in the morning for breakfast, peeling pork crackling from the wire, stuffing in mouthfuls before it turned in the heat of the day.

  SHEARERS’ MOTEL

  It seemed like a thousand people were in the showground shed along with a few hundred sheep — penned up Romneys under high fluorescent lights. Old-time contractors in blue shirts and white moleskins were there, with beer bellies and sun-crusted, pouchy faces. Sheepdogs were there lapping up chocolate milks on the sidelines. Men from the sheds were there in clean singlets, jeans and thongs, silk Hawaiian shirts and everything freshly laundered. They looked as if they’d cornered the market in steam irons at all their motels. Girls from the sheds were there, wearing white cotton blouses, AC/DC and Harley Davidson T-shirts, black shiny-beaded miniskirts and Kung Fu slippers. Carloads had come down to coastal Victoria from as far away as Broken Hill, Bourke, Charleville, Boulia, Winton, Longreach and Muttaburra — all the main shearing towns and beyond, working their way down to be here at this time. The two-man West Australian team came a few weeks earlier, shearing locally to pay their fares over. They didn’t expect so many hills, they said. The district ladies were there, Country Women’s Association and charity workers in stiff pastel frocks serving lamb-steak sandwiches and sausage sandwiches to a hard-living people.

  Louella hadn’t come: she was back at the motel (booked six to a room) keeping to herself. No one said why. No one knew why. No one wondered why. ‘She sometimes has days like this,’ said Rosie, who was drinking cans of UDL and sprinting around in a group with Cal, Lenny, Jules, Bertram Junior, Boland. Oxley was there, head like a medicine ball, staring around with a curled lip, a ready sneer, a foul proposition for a woman and a ready fist for a man. Even Old Jake was there — last seen at Leopardwood Downs, near the Queensland border, when he had pulled the pin over the matter of cleaning up the hocks for the owner. Old Jake wasn’t about to shear competitively, he said. ‘No way, Cookie. I’m in it for dough, not show.’ He had a video camera propped on his shoulder, and it winked a red light whenever a sheep was shorn. He was stoking up memories tonight.

  All the old teams were back together in this shed. Those who had pissed off. Those who had fought. Those who were forgotten. People were in their own story here. They were emphasising their dream, not just living it out. There was no dirty old cook, no eating on the cheap, no recycled leftovers clogged with fat. But there was talk of all those things, reminiscences and remembrances and ‘I said to him’ and ‘She said to me’, because what was terrible at the time was not terrible in recollection. Details at random made a story that when you looked back on it seemed to be going somewhere. It was the shed life, the shed dream, the place you needed because you had to belong somewhere.

  There was a constant supply of refreshments in the showground shed. There were all these mates. There was ventilation coming in from the cool, sea-misty night. There were the lights to enable night shearing, and nobody said, ‘You can’t do that’. The action was focused on the worker and his wants, not on the grower and his needs or the contractor and his demands. Hard work was elevated to championship status. There were prizes, a pedigree of past winners, a genealogy of top shearers destined for publication and renown. The editor of Shearer magazine was over from New Zealand. (There was no such publication in Australia.) It was like a big thank you to yourself to be there. It was like being where you deserved to be and finding yourself esteemed for arriving. It was ‘a sporting fixture where you could really cut loose,’ said Jules.

  He had driven down from Lilypad Station near the Grampians with Harold and some of the mates. He was having his hand shook, his name called out, having a beer passed along. Jules introduced him round as a friend of the family. Old Jake sent him a Dagwood Dog, and nodded, ‘I always appreciated your bread’. The scorching cottony sauce-dripping baton of meat on a stick was indescribable: he had not eaten one since he was a child. Lenny clapped him on the back. Cal stood in his way, his lips moving, framing a greeting, ‘Cookie! How are ya?’ Rosie’s beautiful baby was passed up the bleachers hand to hand, arm to careful arm.

  Harold was down front in his contractors’ shirt and tie, looking serious and worried about what people would say when they saw him as an authority figure, Alastair’s man. He was relaying information to the commentator who’d been flown from New Zealand specially. The commentator was the sheep-world equivalent of a race caller. His voice twanged and cajoled — ‘Bellies, stain, locks, eye wigs, socks’ — speeding descriptively along while assessing a man’s chances in mid-blow: ‘Doesn’t look good for Johnny Tripp at this point in time, he’s slipping back. There’s no one can beat Ranger Keith now, which is why he’s World Champion, ladies and gentleman.’ It must
have been demoralising, he thought, to be ruled out of a race before getting halfway through — but maybe the competitors didn’t hear, because they didn’t look up; the sweat and scraps of wool kept flying. Nothing was absolutely certain anyway. Last year a champion shearer had misjudged a stroke and gutted a ewe on stage. ‘You have to be a machine to get past old Medway,’ said Jules, eyeing a winning competitor. The nuances of competitive shearing were Jules’s forte, said Harold. Jules had arrived from South Australia that night wearing his long black hair in dreadlocks, with beads that clicked and rattled. The style didn’t please Harold, who favoured short military haircuts. ‘A man of forty-five should know better,’ he said, straightening his Wool Board tie and tucking back the tail of his pale blue Glo-Weave boss’s shirt.

  Alastair was there wearing the same style of clothing. He had driven all the way down from the Clean Team headquarters to watch his boys, to stand his ground against other contractors and show he was up with the best, not losing sheds to other teams that year, as rumour had it, but consolidating, providing premium service country-wide as his motto said he’d been doing for these past thirty years: ‘Team Up For An Outstanding Clean Job with Alastair Crown Shearing Services’. There was no putting it straighter than that. He looked exhausted and old as he sat among a bunch of fellow Aussies in the front row. All these men were tired and travel-greasy from years of shuttling between sheds. They spent their non-driving time sitting in offices working the phones. Sometimes they couldn’t help themselves, but jumped in their Falcons and drove around the block, or raced out to the stockyards churning dust behind them and thumping over ruts to get back the feeling of being in the life again. Alastair still worked in a shed whenever he could. At weekends these men never had any peace. Their family life was subordinate to their jobs. When one of them (never Alastair) said he couldn’t give a fuck if he never saw a sheep again, a man like Rocco felt ashamed, because he loved this game, he loved this life, he loved this job.

  The old contractors were finding it hard doing nothing for once. They only wanted to be in charge. Their fists were bunched on their knees nursing beers. Their lives were enriched by these Kiwis here, but this gathering wasn’t the Australian shearing scene they had grown up in. The half-smiles on their faces seemed to indicate that they hoped all this excitement would soon pass — that they would soon be relieved of uneasy bonhomie — so they could again be in a position to break heads, to once more assemble teams with swift decision, and tell a man if he couldn’t make a thousand-kilometre drive overnight for a 7.30 a.m. start then there was no work for him.

  A squad wearing Alastair’s name and phone number on their singlets had already won the wool-handling prize. Rocco had rehearsed them in the ocean-front park earlier in the day, near the Portuguese navigator’s memorial, practising their moves with a sleeping bag on a picnic table as a substitute for a fleece. ‘Go, Bradshaw, go, get stuck into it, brother!’ Afterwards they went around to a gym for a work-out on the press-bench. Back in New Zealand Rocco was a household name, a folk hero, said Harold. Many eyes were on Rocco. At thirty-six he was a role model for Australian-based Kiwis if ever they were prepared to tame elements of wildness in themselves, to refigure their dreams and wrestle themselves down to an even consistency of effort as Rocco had. Tonight Rocco was shearing on the Australian team, as he had in New Zealand earlier in the year. Mostly in Australia he was just another Kiwi shearer powering away in the sheds, raising a family in the backblocks. Now he was the Greg Norman, the John McEnroe of shearing, said Harold — a sportsman, an athlete, a champ of the handpiece. Rocco himself doubted his chances against Ranger Keith. He hadn’t done enough work in preparation, just a few days of intense shearing in working sheds, trying to balance a conditioning programme with Alastair’s client-driven operations. ‘Normally at this time of year we’re stretched out like a shanghai,’ he said.

  The audience sat on the bench seats facing a wooden stage. Heats and variations were over and more people crowded in from the barrooms, the sideshows, the back alleys, the punch-ups, anticipating the final shear-off. Between events, an Aussie master of ceremonies got things wrong. The WA team complained, ‘He’s been calling both of us Kevin all day’. An empty-handed Victorian wondered, ‘Was I supposed to get a cheque?’ They were the MC’s sheep; he was getting them shorn for nothing. Maybe he couldn’t believe his luck and it threw him: it was a grower’s dream, having everything done for free. Rocco stood nobly in the light flexing his fingers, loosening his shoulders, raising himself on his toes. His Maori surname kept getting mangled by the MC but Rocco was used to that. When Rocco was on-form he went into a trance: ‘One sheep out, and just pop, it goes’. He had that look in his eye already. ‘See you later, belly!’

  A shaggy figure threaded its way through the audience. Eyes watched him, wondering what he would do next. He had wild hair and a plastered, lopsided grin. He had been pissed since eleven in the morning. He embraced people, hooted, laughed uproariously at nothing, crouched and cackled, pointing with interior understanding at what he laughed at, who he laughed at.

  ‘What is that man going to do next?’ Harold stroked his chin. The inebriate was Harold’s cousin, and he loved him, but he was a problem. Harold’s climb up the success ladder was enabled by the same relationships that threatened to drag him down. Only if he gave all this up and surrendered back to the life of the ordinary shearer on the board would he gain redemption. Otherwise it was a cruel bargain, this touching the handpiece. Harold made a face, wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead, and mimed exasperation. Last year this cousin had climbed that steel post over against the side wall there, and had swung into wide space, screaming, DON’T FUCK WITH THE KIWIS! People eyed the iron stanchion, wondering if there was going to be a repeat performance tonight. Wouldn’t it be something? The cousin began giving wild Maori yells and turning every head in the place his way, at the top of the stands. Then he looked sideways.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Harold’s cook.’

  The cousin didn’t believe him. He looked him up and down and asked if he was an owner because he was wearing moleskins and a blue shirt. He dug him in the ribs. ‘Won’t the guys take the hocks off for ya, buddy?’ There were people laughing so much that tears ran down their faces. Hooting. Rolling their eyes and looking away. Stamping their feet with a delirious tromp.

  Then it was the finals. Lenny squeezed to the front railing and said he would pay money to watch Rocco shear and that shearing alongside Rocco in the sheds was always an honour. They were off and racing, four slightly built, economically moving men. The place was hushed while handpieces buzzed like insects. The excitement mounted. It was clear that the contest was between just two of them, Rocco and Ranger Keith, and the crowd was barracking for Rocco. When Rocco emerged from the catching pen with his every new sheep he didn’t haul or drag it out as in a normal work situation, but lifted it up, carrying it above-ground in a swift arc to the shearing position, resting it on the dot, so to speak, and engaging his shearing gear at the same instant, cleaving the wool back pop, and see you later, belly. This did not seem like shearing at all, but a process of high-speed sculptural creation: a glassy-eyed, creamy-white, serried-crimped art object resulting. The Australian competitors were not in this at all. ‘By comparison with Rocco, the typical Aussie shearer is a poker,’ said Jules. ‘The Aussie gut is a beer football while the Kiwi gut is a working muscle.’ The crowd rose to its feet, bellowing for Rocco. The crowd couldn’t help though. Rocco slipped half a sheep behind, and Ranger Keith — plucking supreme championship quality from where it was stored — flicked his handpiece out of gear, folded his arms in front of himself, and stood without a sheep, the winner.

  A few glistening, hard-breathing seconds later Rocco was without a sheep too. Bradshaw and all the mates were downcast but Rocco was not. Losing like this was a disappointment not so much for himself but for others. Every event in life, every challenge, was only a rehearsal for the greater test to come, whe
n all people would be sorted out. Winner or loser, Rocco seemed to pose a question: ‘Here is a man, so what must the universe be?’ Rocco, a worker, showed there was no radical break between shed life and the rest of life. Quality of preparation was gospel to Rocco; work was an image of life, holding life’s patterns in its potential.

  Rocco knelt on the board and dismantled his handpiece, laying the parts out on a coarse webbing mat. Bradshaw knelt beside him. The two spoke quietly together in the minutes before the prizegiving, Rocco smiling and throwing his head back in easy-going laughter, Bradshaw going back over the event, analysing the moves and checking his interpretations with Rocco. Wasn’t it something the way Ranger Keith put a handpiece in his foot and still kept shearing? They almost spoke in whispers: then they were talking Maori again. Rocco put his hand on Bradshaw’s shoulder and said something conclusive. They stood while talking. It was as if Rocco was drawing Bradshaw up with a promise. Everyone knew that when the moment was right Bradshaw would make his own move, powering through the ranks of younger competitors to take the world championship crown. He would do it according to a pattern laid down by Rocco.