Shearers' Motel Read online

  Regarding owners, Bertram Junior said one day: ‘They all want something different — it don’t matter what I think, if they want something done you’ve got to do it, it’s their place, it’s their business, it’s their livelihood, it takes them twelve months to grow up the wool we harvest and, you know, you can’t screw it up in three weeks for them because that’s their income and you’ve got to respect them because if you don’t, that’s it, you’re gone. You won’t survive. And I’ll tell you what, Cookie, that’s why I come over here from New Zealand in the first place, because in Australia you can work twelve months of the year if you play it right. You feel safe.’

  The last two shearers, Christian T and Willie-boy, picked through the sandwich box for their favourite fillings. Willie-boy, compact, dynamically built like a fly-weight boxer, was a considerate diner. He angled his Velveeta cheese and green-pickle sandwich around to the light: ‘Not bad, not bad at all’. Then he leant over the day’s fruit selection, consisting of quartered oranges and chunks of rockmelon. ‘You’re spoiling us, Cookie. You really are.’ He tipped back his neck and swallowed a crescent moon of dripping melon.

  ‘Have some more.’

  There was always plenty of rockmelon at Leopardwood Downs. Too much of it now. A glut. ‘Here it is. Melon,’ he beamed, the day it arrived.

  Bertram Junior only stared. ‘I don’t like rockmelon.’

  It arrived twice weekly on the mail truck following the order placed in Bourke. Carton stacked on carton of graded deckle-skinned rockmelon sat in the empty fireplace in the dining mess, hitting Bertram Junior between the eyes every time he walked in.

  Cooks were sacked for less than this.

  ‘Gee, the rotten old cook, we had to sack him. He cut the tomatoes in hunks instead of slicing them. It wasn’t so bad. After he’d cried enough and started his car we felt sorry for him and reinstated him.’

  He spent a lot of his time imagining what people were thinking. It was part of cooking — the incessant gauging of reactions and making of accommodations. But Bertram Junior always had the drop on him, just by the way he looked at him, slowly shaking his head.

  Rockmelons.

  Bertram Junior still wasn’t sure of him — who he was, what he was, where he was from, how he fitted, what use he was, or whether he had a future with the team.

  Our Cookie is right into being that fly on the wall. Look at the way he hangs around at smoko, trying to look dumb. He couldn’t be that dumb.

  BURR ON BURR

  Louella poked her head round the corner of the shed and mournfully asked, ‘Hey, Cookie, y’got an apple?’ It was all she would eat until tea-time — all she ever ate, it seemed. Barbara stepped past her and they avoided each other’s eyes. Davo was in the act of consuming a triple-decker sandwich of cold mutton and chutney, curried egg, cheese and tomato. Old Jake came back from washing at the outside tank and downed a swiftly-mixed Milo, took a mug of tea to follow, collecting a clutch of biscuits and a trio of Fritz and mustard-pickle sandwiches, topping them with a chunk of rockmelon. With everything teetering in a pile he padded back to his corner at the far end of the shed, where he sank to the floor, knees tucked under his chin, bare toes knuckled up.

  A shearing shed was a special kind of factory. It stood idle, empty, most of the year, cloaked in mysterious ruin. Swallows nested in the rafters, beetles swarmed in the wool bins, rats nested in the walls, owls glided through the gloom. Sheds could be moody, haunted places in their off-time.

  Like any factory the working shed had a clock, a pattern of work-flow, individual and team production targets. It was an assembly line functioning by deleting the raw material. There was no massed surge of workers through the gates in the mornings. Workers across the country divided into smaller and smaller bands, each team complete in itself, down to the smallest team operating independently, taking their own cook with them into the camp-out. This was the size of team he was cooking for at Leopardwood Downs.

  There was a simple formula in the shed: keep the wool moving. Everyone knew it — shearers, classer, rouseabouts, presser, the owner and his helpers. The cook as well. The forces at work on the shearing team were as deceptively smooth as the forces operating on a pool table. Nudge one ball and another reacted. He felt this in the kitchen — what if he fouled up? The owner felt it in the back paddock, droving in wethers for the next day’s shearing. He knew he was the crux (it wasn’t just ego or possession, either). What if the sheep went streaming into the donga, never to be seen again? Mrs Holgate felt it back at the homestead, filling every available container with water, and freezing it solid in the row of chest freezers along the verandah wall. It was a killing heat now. Men were drinking a litre an hour and more. They had gutaches and cramps. Mrs Holgate made an ice run twice a day, keeping the men happy.

  ‘You haven’t got the bitchiness you get in factories,’ she said. ‘They’re getting rid of some of their frustrations shearing. You know, burning energy. But I think you need women in the sheds for that flow — you need a mixture, just to give it that family sort of feeling.’

  Blocks of ice were delivered to the quarters, and carted over to the shed on the cook’s smoko runs — ice in all imaginable shapes tumbling out of rinsed-out styrofoam vegetable boxes, ice in the form of a teapot, even, with the spout intact.

  ‘Your average grower wouldn’t go to that sort of trouble,’ Bertram Junior noted, his eyes shining and his chest jutting out proudly. He liked this client and his missus. There was a chance that ice would cool whatever trouble was brewing.

  At smoko he drank his tea and listened and watched. He saw Pam (fresh from Kiwi) stamping her foot, twisting her shoulders, putting her nose in the air. Whatever it was, it wasn’t how it was done back home. Whatever it was, Barbara sternly reminded her, was how it was done here. The atmosphere told him that relations were breaking down between those at one end of the work-ladder who were working because they had to, and those at the other end whose way of life was tied up in doing the best job possible. Louella’s hands were sore. The wool was full of burr (‘burr on burr’ was the technical classification). Barbara advised Louella to tape up her hands, but she didn’t want to. Why should she. Why should she put herself back in a situation like school, where pakeha teachers ordered you around, ‘do this’, ‘do that’, till you just wanted to walk out on the whole lot of them. And where did you go? Into the sheds.

  He saw Bertram Junior stroking his chin, tightening his mouth, swivelling his eyes around, looking determined. The classing table and rouseabout revolt weren’t his only problems. Being an overseer wasn’t easy. From what he had seen, Bertram Junior burnt the candle at both ends, then torched it in the middle. If he thought too much about the perfectionist requirements for overseeing he’d surely go crazy. Alastair always said a top overseer had to be a unique person. Did any such person ever exist? He had to be able to turn round and show anybody how to shear. He had to class wool, and he had to be the best classer in the place if he was going to hold his job for long and keep the respect of growers. He had to be able to control people. He had to be able to control the grower by convincing him that he was doing as good a job as expected. He had to be the best expert about the place, in the sense of grinding tools and fixing up machinery. He had to be a top psychologist if there were any family problems in the team. He was the first one anyone came to with problems — so he had to be able to understand people, the changes in people when they were under stress. Not only that, he had to know how to cook as well — what groceries to get, how many loaves of bread were needed for a week for a given amount of workers. (Right down to whether they liked melons or whatever.) He had to watch all those things. It was a hell of a big job, as well as doing an eight-hour day shearing — any overseer was doing one man’s job already without the other. And who was Bertram Junior? A young bloke in a hard country trying to juggle a liking for people and life with being all that. Someone had to be joking.

  Some nights Cookie would stagger off to bed at
eleven, and Bertram Junior would still be sitting at the mess table, surrounded by paperwork, muttering his good-nights. One morning when he got up at his usual time of quarter to five Bertram Junior was there, sitting at the mess table surrounded by sheets of paper and folded-back cheque books, staring like an insomniac. ‘I been up all night since you slacked off,’ he accused.

  Barbara moved around the smoko bale briskly, economically selecting her smoko and sitting quietly beside Davo, conserving her stamina. As she ate, she played with her dog, feeding him scraps. She had an unfazed smile — not the sort of woman who would be defeated by a crisis of authority. She had about her a tensioned, tuned wariness. Against the low, confused murmur of Louella and Pam’s objections to her work practices she sent out her signal: Do it my way or not at all.

  Bertram Junior and Maurice Holgate were discussing the weather — big storms over Alice Springs. Maybe a wet was coming this way. Wet wool was the grower’s nightmare. The storms surely wouldn’t drift this way, though. He stood near the galvanised, propped-open cantilever windows of the wool bay and stared out at the eye-hurting landscape. The openings were wide as movie screens, framing red sandhills and low, intricate, endless scrub in both directions. The sun throbbed and glared. Heat radiated from every given point in space.

  ‘Git away, yer hound!’ bellowed Christian T, giving Davo and Barbara’s border collie a sharp kick with his shearing boot. (The boot was manufactured from hemp. It looked like a mauled ginger terrier.)

  ‘Touch my dog —’ warned Davo, making a fist.

  ‘Gah, go and get fucked,’ Christian T jabbed, finishing his sentence with an upright finger. The banter was ill-natured, but wouldn’t lead to anything. Davo was a lean, agile six-footer who proposed punch-ups as the solution to shed problems. A challenge from Christian T was nothing. The guy was leaving. Even if he wasn’t, why should Davo bother messing his hands up. (Not over you, fella.)

  Christian T and his wife had recently arrived in Australia from New Zealand with the aim of saving the deposit for a house back home. They worked their first shed at Hay, she as a rouseabout, and they hated what they found. How could people live in this country? They would have to be stupid, eh. Too bloody far from anywhere, and Jesus Christ, mate, the heat. Both hated it equally, but Christian T wasn’t going to turn tail without a dollar. His missus announced she was going home without him. That night they fought. It happened inside the quarters, in their room, doors and windows closed tight. He wouldn’t give her money for her ticket. But off she went anyway, eye swollen, lip split, cheek bruised, back to Kiwi. In town for a week between sheds, alone, Christian T sat in a hotel room drinking piss, smiling to himself, brooding. Hay wasn’t a very big place. He acted like he wasn’t in it. There was never any change to Christian T’s expression. He was like a rat in a cartoon, always affable, with a bewhiskered smile, a sparkle of black-eyed charm. As a little boy, he must have gone the whole hog on charm and decided it was all he needed. You see, he was fooling you — had you taped — and when you weren’t looking he’d pull something clever, like stealing your beer from the fridge, or saying you’d ripped him off over radio batteries, all the time telling you about the times he’d had in the abattoirs, where the guys steamed roasts in the autoclave. ‘Ever worked in a slaughterhouse, Cookie?’

  One reason he was glad to be sleeping away from the huts was that the cook’s room was next to where Christian T had himself locked in. All night he played a borrowed radio, belched, groaned, knocked things over in the dark, farted, and sighed long, baffled sighs until somewhere towards daylight he began to snore.

  The shearers headed back to the board. The two rousies, Louella and Pam, glowering in the wool bins, granted themselves another minute of time — they were that much farther down the production line. They weren’t going to make any obvious effort. Not with Barbara pushing.

  Barbara yawned, dusted crumbs from her knees, tidied her hair, and stood ready for the next two-hour run. If the shed walls flipped over and the roof went sailing into space, and this heat set the world on fire, she would stay cool.

  A shout came from back in the shed somewhere, the diesel engine gave a kick, a chug, a rumble, and the belt drive flopped into motion, rotating the shearing gear.

  As he dumped smoko crusts and leftover tea slops out the side window he waited for Davo to tell him something. Last man at the horizontal was Davo, snoozing his extra couple of minutes away, arm shielding his eyes. If anyone had an eye for the drama of the shed, following the goings-on with feisty curiosity, it was Davo. He’d already told him a lot — made an instant shearers’ cook out of him on that very first day, for example. Now he said: ‘Most cooks don’t hang round at smoko time’. It wasn’t a criticism. It was a way of saying he didn’t need to waste time making sure things were all right all the time.

  ‘By the way,’ he stretched. ‘What’s for lunch?’

  ‘Your basic leftovers.’

  ‘Heap on the meat, mate.’

  The wool bins wouldn’t start refilling for a while yet, but now Davo’s name was being called from the holding pens, because he wasn’t just a presser, on this small team, he was a shed hand as well. ‘Pen em up!’ Some contractors deigned to put on the extra man, but not Clean Team Alastair. ‘Bloody hell. You wouldn’t believe it, would you.’ Davo clenched a smoke between his teeth while he kneed sheep forward. Light still came through the floorboards, and the sheep baulked despite Maurie Holgate’s days of hammering.

  ‘Alastair would have to be the original tightarse,’ raged Davo.

  In the kitchen he slid dark, crusty rolls from the oven, brought the roast shoulder up a shelf or two, and grabbed at a recipe book, between times, to see what could be done with two kilos of frozen peas that had gone slushy in the gas freezer, and were starting to smell sharp, like paint stripper. An hour to go till dinner-time.

  No barely subdued panic though. Not so far. Moving around the kitchen he congratulated himself. Mentally he’d planned ahead till the end of the week — knew what each meal would involve: had calculated quantities, and knew what had to be done in advance, and when. He could anticipate Friday night, now, promising himself another six-pack chilled down to toothache coldness. And Saturday, another day again, when he’d read a book, make cups of coffee at any hour, and write letters home:

  ‘Sandridge raised above scrubline visible from hut window. About a kilometre off, another world. Emus stalk there. Roos come slithering down. Hawks hunt the updrafts. I’ve seen the owner’s sister there, sitting in the thin shade of acacias, sketchbook on her knee.’

  That sort of letter — evocative?

  He’d make a boast:

  ‘Cook invisible in kitchen even in a crowd, people talk, say anything they like, in words, in body language, in stares — and I feel what’s going on, they forget about me, I become invisible, I disappear.’

  He chopped half an onion, opened a tin of three bean mix, tipped the beans into a bowl, shook pepper over them, and spooned the onion in. Then he added a handful of finely chopped green capsicum and, with sly inspiration, a dusting of chilli powder. It looked good. Tasted good. (If you liked three bean mix.)

  Another boast floated up:

  ‘I’m turning into a proper cook. Maybe I’ll buy checked trousers, get a white cap, have my hair cut short — hygienic. I’ll develop a pernickety, critical manner, cultivate the indoor complexion of a pro, eyes like swollen tea bags. (See me already.) I’ll open a business. Marie and Ella serving tables, stating the facts the way they can. You doing the books, working the front of house. Wouldn’t be hard. Long stained tables with bench seats — guests carve their initials while they wait — no menus because you eat what you get. But a few smart improvements — like fridges to keep beer cold, for example. (Start with that.) And an offsider like Davo here to fling anyone giving the finger against a force like Bertram Junior who rattles malcontents’ heads like coconuts and whips them out into the open, into the dirt yards, where scores are settled.

>   ‘Spread a bucket of red dust on the floors, with star-shaped bindiis to wedge under guests’ thongs. Rough-up a stack of People, Australasian Post, and Rugby League Week. Dump them on the end of the table for mealtime reading. Buy mattresses from St Vincent de Paul. Call it home.’

  His mind raced, his biro plunged across a dozen pages of imagining.

  ‘Bertram Junior keeps mentioning the shearers’ quarters at the Arid Zone Experimental Station, Red Rock Gorge, where I might, or might not, be cook next time. Depends, he says, looking away into the distance. He is always agonising about something. So I leave him to the privacy of his thoughts and imagine myself doing laps of the Red Rock pool while the lunchtime roast sizzles in the fan-forced oven, or I sprawl under a beach umbrella reading Call Me When the Cross Turns Over while dishes rumble in the dishwasher, and my assistant cook, who Bertram Junior understands comes with the place and will certainly lend a hand, peels potatoes and quarters pumpkins ready for the night’s grub-up.’

  Between smoko and lunch one day, he drove down the track to Leopardwood Downs homestead and rang home. Sharon would have his letter by now. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, but he waited. The phone always took a long time answering because Sharon was mostly outside, across at their own two-stand shed hammering over gaps in the iron, or laying stones in the garden, or up a ladder hauling lumber from the roofspace where she planned to build a loft with her own bare hands if finance wasn’t forthcoming from somewhere. Or she would be sitting in the grass with the reins of her pony looped over her wrist, planning paddock rotations. Or maybe in town dropping the girls at school. What day was it there anyway? It was still early. Where was the place, he asked himself, that he couldn’t even call home in his own mind — because of this impulse that was on him to travel, to shed parts of himself without thinking.