Growing Pineapples in the Outback

by Tony Kelly

  ‘Yep,’ I replied.

  Another in an almost identical outfit chimed in: ‘Have you come up from Melbourne too?’

  ‘No, I live in Mount Isa.’

  They both nodded encouragingly. I was almost a local.

  ‘What work do you do?’ The first one again.

  ‘I work in native title.’

  Silence. The men shuffled uncomfortably.

  ‘Mainly with the people around Mount Isa,’ I continued, ‘but also with the Winton traditional owners just down the road here.’ I didn’t know how to stop. ‘The claim is only over Crown land, you know, but that does include pastoral leases. But don’t worry, pastoralists’ rights will always trump native title rights.’

  My nephew Dan, who had overheard the conversation, came to rescue me. ‘Another beer, Tone?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ I looked at the men. ‘You fellas need a drink?’

  They shook their heads. Saying our farewells, Dan and I walked off together. ‘Perhaps stick to the State of Origin or the weather,’ Dan advised.

  He was right: the scions of the early settlers – the great-grandchildren of the murderers, dispersers and dispossessors – clearly didn’t want to bat the breeze about native title.

  At the hospital I sign in at the day surgery reception desk, and the young woman on duty directs me to a foyer on level one, where I am to wait until called by the nurse. There are four other people ahead of me, so I suspect I’m in for a long wait. I send Beck a text:

  About to go under the knife. How are you?

  She replies:

  All good. I feel bad. I should be there with you.

  I don’t mind that Beck’s not here. She has a play on in Melbourne, and these trips out of Mount Isa are essential so she can maintain her career. I’m surprised at how difficult she’s found it to get a foot in the door here, given how skilled and experienced she is. But she’s been away for thirty-five years, and that makes her an outsider. The fact that she’s now based in Melbourne – the big city – doesn’t help. I’m lucky I have a workplace to go to each day, whereas Beck sits at her desk in the study only a couple of metres away from Diana, day in and day out.

  I text:

  I’m fine. How’s Melbourne? How did the show go last night?

  Beck replies:

  Really good. The audience seemed to like it.

  I am fine, I realise. The trips to Longreach and then Hinchinbrook have restored my sense of balance. The previous few months, I have to admit, had been hard work.

  In August Rebecca was away for three weekends in a row. On the first weekend was the Mount Isa rodeo. I was excited to go and had planned to spend the evening with Belinda, Seppo and their daughters. But one of the girls was sick so Belinda wasn’t able to come. I arrived early to see the parade, which (rather bizarrely) is called the Mardi Gras Parade. There was neither bling nor razzle-dazzle, just a few trucks with kids on the back, waving and throwing glitter and lollies into the crowd.

  I thought Seppo would text me when he arrived, but he didn’t and, feeling shy, I chose not to contact him. After the parade I went into the arena and watched a few events. The bull riding is the most popular, with contenders attempting to stay on a bucking bull for eight seconds. That doesn’t sound long, but on a wildly bucking and kicking bull it is, and many riders don’t make it. I found it an anticlimactic sport, with lots of time spent waiting around. After the bull riding I stayed on for the ‘rope and tie’. This involves someone on horseback chasing down a startled calf with a lasso, jumping on top of it and immobilising it by tying up its feet. I was fascinated and appalled at the same time.

  From the arena I went to sideshow alley and stood behind the gathering crowd at Fred Brophy’s boxing tent. He was banging the drum and spruiking for local wannabes to take on his boxers, and for punters to pay the entry fee and watch the fights. So this is what ‘rallying around the drum’ actually means, I realised. Despite Fred’s hype, I couldn’t shift my forlorn mood, and went home.

  The next weekend my mood fell even further. It came out of the blue. I’m by nature buoyant and rarely feel anything worse than a mild torpor, but not that day. I went into town on Saturday morning to buy some groceries and look for some heat beads to blind-bake some pastry. Diana and I planned to cook meat pies together: me preparing the pastry, she the filling.

  It was the radio interview I heard with a permaculture hunt-and-gather man from the Central Highlands of Victoria that did me in. He could even have been someone I knew from when I lived in that part of Victoria years ago. I certainly knew his kind: people who live with a small footprint, wholesome and rugged, with skills to build high-tech, low-energy houses from timber sourced from their own block, and who can grow mountains of organic food, which they then pickle and preserve, and who rear, butcher, smoke and cure their own livestock.

  The man on the radio described taking his home-schooled kids out into the forest to hunt for their dinner using a bow and arrow. I could picture him and his kids walking through the dripping woodlands. I could taste the moisture in the air. I could feel the dark, friable soil in my hands, from which plump vegetables would be plucked. I could smell the sourdough baking in the woodstove, and hear the glug of the dark ale and the gentle murmur of companionship.

  I looked out into the glare of Miles Street, with its ugly iron-clad shops. The huge pub on the corner full of pokies, oversized steaks and mass-produced beers held nothing for me. I recognised none of the sun-damaged, tight-lipped people clambering out of their oversized four-wheel drives. I was a stranger in this alien land. The long weekend stretched before me. My only outing apart from this was likely to be taking Diana to church on Sunday morning.

  An overwhelming sense of despair descended on me like a pall. I sat in the car, immobilised, with tears welling in my eyes. I was tired of the harshness of the town. Tired of its sameness. The mind-numbing conventionality. I was tired of the fucking ugliness.

  My sister Mary Jo once said, when she moved to Brisbane from Melbourne forty years ago, that ‘Queenslanders as a race are uglier than Victorians’. It was an outrageous thing to say on the face of it, but her observation was twofold. Firstly, at that time in Brisbane there was very little ethnic diversity, and most people were of Anglo-Celtic stock. Not the most attractive genetic pool, let’s face it. (I feel free to say that, being 75 per cent Anglo-Celtic.) Secondly, there was a lack of interest in fashion and grooming, which was rooted in an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural, take-me-as-you-find-me attitude, which seemed to deepen the further north and west you went.

  Looking out of my car window at the red-faced people walking down Miles Street wearing branded T-shirts, long shorts and thongs, my despair deepened. I’m not a particularly snappy dresser, and I’m partial to T-shirts (without a logo, mind you), shorts (though not long) and thongs myself, but right then I craved some difference. I wanted to see someone with a sense of style walk past. I wanted my eyes to rest upon something different, something with softness and grace.

  The night before, the barking dogs had been particularly bad, and the lack of sleep wasn’t helping my mood. This town is full of dogs that bark. Big, ugly mongrel dogs that pace and seethe in the confines of their heavily fenced yards. Every one of our immediate neighbours has one or more dogs, and they all bark incessantly. I have no idea what sets them off, but once one starts they all go and the sound reverberates around the rocky hills. It has become one of our favourite topics of conversation. Diana’s not generally up for much chatting in the morning, but nevertheless most days we discuss the dogs. ‘Did you hear the dogs last night?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, they were bad,’ Diana replies.

  ‘I hardly slept,’ I add.

  ‘I rarely sleep,’ Diana concludes.

  No one ever seems to walk the dogs. No wonder they bark. My great-niece’s boyfriend, Travis, told me that many dogs are kept for pigging �
�� or, as he says, piggin’. Travis himself likes to go piggin’ – and campin’ and fishin’, for that matter. I now understand the cages on the back of utes I see around town. ‘They’re for cartin’ the dogs when you go piggin’,’ he said.

  Travis also educated me about boxin’. ‘Once them dogs have cornered the pig, you slit its throat and throw it on the back of the ute. Then drop it in the box back in town.’

  The box, I discovered, is an air-conditioned container that, when it’s full of dead pigs, gets transported to the pet food factory. Mount Isa dogs are not for promenading.

  I knew that my despair wasn’t being brought on just by the harshness of the town or my lack of sleep – it was born of something deeper, something that had been brewing since we came to Mount Isa. Rebecca and I haven’t accumulated much wealth. We have some money in a term deposit from the sale of a house we once owned in Daylesford, but it isn’t much. I have a reasonable super balance but Beck, as a consequence of being a self-employed artist for most of her professional life, has virtually none. Age is creeping up on us – although that seems a ridiculous thing to think about when you’re living with a ninety-year-old – and we’re starting to worry about being poor in retirement.

  Health permitting, we have only fifteen or so good earning years ahead of us. For many years I’ve assumed we had plenty of time to sort out our retirement, but now the future feels as if it’s on our doorstep. Some people buy lotto tickets; we’ve gambled on some unforeseen event putting us in clover. An extremely well-paying job? My short-lived career as a Collins Street lawyer was my best chance of that. A cascade of royalties from Beck’s writing? Perhaps that’s still to come. As we’re ageing, we’re becoming more and more aware that dreams are not the foundation upon which to build financial security.

  I rail against this preoccupation and feel that it’s a middle-class obsession. An indulgence. But that’s wrong: all people, regardless of class, are concerned about their old age. Security is a universal striving. I try to reassure myself that in Australia, come what may, with our meagre savings and super, combined with the pension and other social support services, we’ll be able to keep ourselves. We’ll definitely be better off than the vast majority of people in the world. It will be a small and simple life, and different to that lived by many of our peers, who have kept their eye on the long game. We won’t have the beautifully renovated inner-city house. We won’t have the overseas trips. We will have to be discerning about the food and clothes we buy and the things we do. In my worst moments I imagine us rattling around a cold and rundown house, wearing ill-fitting op-shop jeans, waiting for our children to visit. In the early hours of the morning, as I lie in bed with my eyes wide open, it’s shame and fear that churns my stomach.

  I turned the radio off and got out of the car. The permaculture man’s puritanism was starting to get to me. No doubt inherited wealth was what gave him the luxury to get off the grid! I went into Bella Duck, a homewares shop. I like Bella Duck, it’s well stocked with good-quality kitchenware. An oasis amid the desolation of Kmart and the one-dollar shops. I found my heat beads and, feeling that my equilibrium had been slightly restored, headed home.

  A week later and another weekend without Beck loomed. Before the unease of a lonely weekend had the opportunity to take hold, Beck’s niece Belinda invited me to the races. Apart from the rodeo and the occasional barbecue at Belinda’s, this was the first thing I had been invited to in the six months we’d been in Mount Isa.

  I paid my twenty-dollar entry fee and went straight to the bar for a drink, where I was redirected to the ticket booth. In Queensland, it’s not uncommon at public events to have to buy tickets for drinks and even for food. Then you take your ticket to another booth and exchange it for the consumable you require. This strange quirk of Queensland’s liquor licensing laws not only forces double handling, but means you have to know in advance how many drinks you’re going to consume, and what type. I did the maths – I’ll probably stay two to three hours, and I’m driving, so three mid-strength beers will do me – and bought three XXXX Gold tickets.

  Belinda was already there with Seppo, some of his relatives and a few mates. He did the introductions. ‘This is my uncle Tony from Melbourne.’

  One fella shook my hand. ‘You’re from Melbourne?’

  I nod. Technically I’m from Adelaide, but this didn’t seem the time for technicalities.

  ‘That makes you a Prictorian then, eh,’ he taunted with a laugh.

  I grimaced and turned away, not wishing to engage in further conversation with him or others in his party, and slowly sipped my beer.

  I’m not a regular frequenter of the races but some of my earliest and fondest childhood memories are of going to the Easter Oakbank races in the Adelaide Hills when my dad was still alive. As a family we would pile into the blue Valiant station wagon and head out of town to be joined by cousins and other families for a large rambling picnic under the trees next to the track. We’d spend hours playing in the creek and surrounding bush, circling back to the picnic occasionally for food and drink, paying little interest to the races.

  Belinda joined me. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said.

  ‘It’s okay. I’m not in a very social mood,’ I replied.

  After a few moments Belinda told me she was going to place a bet. ‘How about you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, maybe in a tick.’

  Belinda left me to my own devices and went to place her bet – and no doubt find some better company. I scanned the stark racetrack and tight groups of friends huddled around the bar. Feeling like I didn’t belong, I finished my beer and left.

  So much for my afternoon out. When I got home I realised I still had two beer tickets in my pocket. So much for my maths.

  I don’t have to wait long before I’m called into surgery. I guess I must be in a different queue to the others, who are still leafing through out-of-date magazines or playing with their phones. The orderlies put me on a gurney and wheel me down a corridor, where I’m left waiting for another half-hour. There’s some drama about the power in one of the operating rooms, I’m told, and there is a possibility my operation will be called off. With rising annoyance, I start to expect that I’ll have to go through this whole procedure another day, but then the anaesthetist turns up. He makes some idle chatter about Melbourne, asks me to count down from ten, and I drift off.

  I feel disgusting when I wake a few hours later. ‘Everything went to plan,’ the nurse tells me. ‘You’ll need to stay here until you pass water, and then you can go. But someone will have to pick you up.’

  ‘I live with my mother-in-law,’ I say. ‘She doesn’t drive, and my wife’s out of town. I’ll get a taxi.’

  ‘No can do – you’ll have to call someone. What about a work colleague or a friend?’

  I nod obediently.

  In between drifting off to sleep, I try to drink as much water as I can so that I piss. I feel nauseous from the anaesthetic and am in considerable pain.

  Around 6 pm I finally manage a small wee and get the all clear. I suddenly remember that the meeting will have started, and text Bernice:

  I’m just being let out and I’m in too much pain. I won’t make it.

  Don’t worry, she replies; she has organised for a colleague to be on the line from Brisbane to answer any legal questions. Evidently Bernice knew right from the start I wouldn’t make the meeting.

  I ring Belinda and ask her to pick me up. She’s confused. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s okay, just a day op. I’ll explain when you get here.’

  I tell the nurse my niece is coming and they release me. I gingerly make my way down to the ground floor and out the front doors. A wave of nausea hits me at the entrance and I vomit into a bin just as Belinda pulls up.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks. ‘I would’ve come earlier.’

  I can tell she’s hur
t that I didn’t let on and I feel sheepish.

  Belinda helps me into the house. Diana sees instantly that I’m not as shipshape as I thought I’d be, and gets out of her chair and shuffles into the kitchen. ‘I’ve made soup.’

  ‘I don’t think I can manage soup, but some dry biscuits and water would be great.’

  I collapse on the couch and let Diana tend to me. The next morning I’m too unwell to go to work and give over to Diana’s care. She rises to the occasion in remarkable fashion, and spends the day making me cups of tea and bringing me lunch and snacks, while I languish on the couch.

  Diana and I slip into an easy companionship, as we tend to whenever Beck goes away. It’s not that Beck’s presence creates tension, but something happens between us when Beck’s out of town. I’m not blood. I’m not the one who chides her when she eats too many sweets or doesn’t exercise. I don’t pull her up when she’s emotionally withdrawn. That’s Beck’s job, the tasks of the daughter. This allows a sense of ease to settle between us.

  Diana and I weren’t always close. It took us quite a few years to find a way to understand each other. I used to think it was because four months into my relationship with Beck, I broke it off. Beck was heartbroken, and no parent likes to see their child in despair. Diana, like Beck, had to learn to trust that I wouldn’t do that again, which they both did.

  The distance between us was, I suspect, more to do with culture. I grew up in a middle-class, urban Catholic household. Diana grew up in a poor, rural Anglican household. My mother’s father was Italian, and my mother was by nature warm and demonstrative. I’m a man who talks about emotions, works with blackfellas and votes Green. Diana, by nature, is reserved and has lived her life in the bush, most of it in a hard mining town, where men work, drink and go piggin’, and don’t talk about emotions. We come from different worlds.

  Not long before Beck went to Melbourne she was sitting at the kitchen table and Diana was shuffling back to her chair, and for some reason she stopped behind Beck and placed her hands on Beck’s shoulders. I saw this out of the corner of my eye and a small charge went through me. It dawned on me that I had no memory of ever seeing Diana touch Beck before, apart from farewell and greeting hugs and the like, and I was shocked by the touch – and by the realisation that I was shocked. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Beck said when I raised this with her later that night. ‘She often touches me affectionately.’ I let it drop.