Growing Pineapples in the Outback

by Tony Kelly

  ‘It’s a good thing that you’re doing,’ Allie says.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I think so too.’

  Allie turns to Lucille. ‘Are you gunna do that for Beck when she’s old, Lu?’

  ‘Georgie said she would do it,’ Lu replies.

  I laugh.

  ‘No, seriously,’ says Lu, ‘we’ve already got you and Dad booked into a nursing home.’

  We all laugh, but I make a mental note that nothing has changed from our conversation of over a year ago.

  I don’t say anything for a moment. Of course this question has crossed my mind in the last sixteen months. Is part of what Tony and I doing also about setting a good example for our children? Is what we are doing for Mum what we want our children to do for us?

  ‘The thing with Mum,’ I say, ‘was that she didn’t ever want to talk about, or make plans for, when she would be too old to look after herself. She maintained active avoidance and denial until there was no other option. Hopefully Tony and I won’t do that.’

  ‘Even if you do,’ says Lu, ‘Georgie and I will still look after you.’

  My heart skips a beat. I would never want to force my children into having to do this for me, but it is good to know that they have this sense of empathy and loyalty.

  ‘But I get first pick of the things in your wardrobe,’ Lu adds.

  I shrug and laugh. Everything comes at a price. I’ve got no idea what the future might bring, but I do make a pledge to myself that I will try to be open and engaged in taking responsibility for my ageing.

  Allie sits back and gestures to the finished tattoo. I stare at it for quite a while without saying anything. It suddenly dawns on me that it is permanent.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asks.

  ‘You bet I do!’ I say.

  ‘Pineapples forever,’ says Allie.

  I nod and smile. ‘Yeah, pineapples forever!’

  10

  Stumble

  Tony

  I’m on the early Monday-morning water taxi from Stradbroke Island to the mainland. I’ve done this journey a couple of times before, years ago when I used to live in Brisbane – before Beck, before kids. It’s stunningly beautiful, and back then I would spend the journey imagining an island life, going to work each morning across the bay with the high-school kids and commuters. But today I’m too anxious to indulge this fantasy. I’m not sure if I’ll have a job by the end of the week.

  I’ve spent the weekend with our good friend Judy, who is holidaying on the island, and today I’m returning to Brisbane for work. I’m meant to be going to a two-day strategic planning workshop with my colleagues. It was my idea to have the workshop, and the CEO, Warren, was quick to get on board with it. But now he is angry with me, and has directed me not to attend.

  It all fell apart last Friday when I was negotiating my next one-year contract. Warren thought I was being unreasonable and shut down discussions.

  I ring my direct boss as the boat pulls up alongside the jetty. He tells me the CEO’s still angry and suggests I work from the Brisbane office until my flight back to Mount Isa in two days’ time. ‘We can sort it out later,’ he says.

  This doesn’t fill me with confidence. I’m embarrassed by the misunderstanding and the subsequent falling-out. Until now, my relationship with Warren has been good and I rated him highly. I’m also upset by the worry the matter is causing Beck and Diana. They are, first and foremost, worried for me, but I know that within that worry is the question of whether we can remain in Mount Isa if I lose my job. The whole project is in jeopardy.

  Eventually, I return to Mount Isa, and over the course of the following week I’m told that I will be, despite the falling-out, offered another contract on largely unchanged terms. Before signing it, I insist on a telephone meeting with Warren. I want to know if I can have a sensible conversation with him, and if he’ll offer an explanation for his behaviour. He’s unavailable to meet with me for over a week, but eventually we talk. After explaining the reasons for his anger, he offers me an apology. I’m not entirely convinced, but for the sake of keeping my job and being able to stay in Mount Isa, I accept it. Still upset, I hang up. I’m unsure how long I’m going to last.

  A few hours later Beck calls to tell me our dinner plans that night with friends have fallen through. It was, in fact, our first non-family invitation since moving here, and coincides with the one-year anniversary of our arrival. But I’m not in a going-out mood anyway, and we realise it would be better to celebrate the anniversary at home with Diana. I buy some fish from the iceworks and Beck puts a bottle of champagne in the fridge. When I get home from work we have a beer under the house. The rocky hills are afire with the setting sun.

  ‘I don’t think he gets it,’ I tell Beck.

  ‘Gets what?’ Beck asks.

  ‘Gets that his behaviour has a strong impact on people. I think he genuinely believes it’s all sorted, and we’ll go back to business as usual.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Beck asks. ‘Do you need to go back to your old job in Melbourne?’

  ‘What I want to do and need to do are two separate things. I want to tell Warren to shove it, but I need to let it go. I need to get on with the job and get on with life here.’

  Beck takes my hand, leans in and kisses me gently on the lips. ‘Thank you.’

  By now it’s dark and we head upstairs to cook our fish and chips. After dinner we take our champagne outside onto the verandah. It’s still very hot. I put on some Ella Fitzgerald and for a while we sit in silence, until Beck starts to softly sing ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’. After a while Diana and I join in, at first tentatively and then with more confidence. For the next hour the three of us sing, tap and hum along to the music.

  It’s Saturday night, and we’ve just finished dinner. Beck and Diana start a game of Upwords while I go outside to move the sprinklers. By the time I come back up the stairs, Beck and Diana have slipped into roleplay.

  Beck is an Irish character called Kathleen. ‘Well, you wouldn’t be trying to cheat on me, now, Ma?’

  Diana laughs and plays along. ‘I don’t need to cheat to win.’

  She’s out of practice and her accent’s not as good as Beck’s, but the two of them become hysterical. I can’t help but smile as I wash up.

  It seems like a veil has been lifted from Beck. She’s a happy person by nature, but at times self-doubt and worry have brought her low. But here, under the western sun, in her childhood home, she’s consistently buoyant.

  ‘Perhaps Kathleen and her cheating friend could help me with the dishes,’ I suggest from the sink.

  ‘You’ve got to be feckin’ kidding,’ Beck says. ‘That’s what you’re here for, boyo. You’re of no other use to us.’

  ‘Yeah, what she says,’ echoes Diana.

  I finish the dishes on my own and go to the lounge to read my book, and Beck and Diana continue to play. Beck leads for most of the game, but Diana comes home strongly and wins.

  It’s still early, and Beck suggests we go to The Shack. The Shack is the fortnightly open-mic night run by the local folk club. I’m ambivalent. We’ve been three or four times over the last twelve months, and while I enjoy going to an extent, I find it hard to fully embrace. This makes me feel churlish. What’s better than people having fun and being creative, making music? And I come from a musical family, so you’d think I’d support it. But the performers aren’t very good, I tell myself, so why bother? They’re not my brother, sister, niece or nephew. They’re not rising stars on the scene in Melbourne. I worry that my reluctance is snobbish.

  I know Beck’s keen to get out of the house and check out what’s going on, and it’s not as if we have many other options. ‘Okay, I’m in,’ I tell her.

  It’s still stinking hot as we walk along the track by the side of the river. The glowing mine is straight ahead of us, and looks forbid
ding as it hums and shimmers beneath a haze of heat and dust. We walk past Beck’s old primary school, and she points to a dark gully around the back. ‘That’s where we did Aboriginal culture in Grade Four or Five. Over a week we built a gunya out of bark and sticks, and then on the last day the teacher handed out lolly grubs – “bush tucker,” he said. And that was it – the sixty-thousand-year history of this country in one week.’

  We continue walking. I try to imagine Beck as a kid running around the schoolyard and down in the dry creek bed with her classmates. Sweaty and excitable.

  Our friend Annette and her daughter Misha are on stage when we arrive. They sound good together. The place is three-quarters full and we find a table near one of the big oscillating fans bracketed to the wall. It’s an open-air venue but the heat lies heavy. I go to the bar and buy two XXXX Golds – no tickets required here.

  The place fills up quickly with large groups of half-cut young miners with nowhere else to go. The mother–daughter duo is replaced by a group of schoolteachers of varying ability. Their enthusiasm helps cover the gaps, and they get a good response from the crowd.

  Next up is a thin man in his fifties. He’s wearing harem pants, a cotton vest and an old leather hat and sandals, and he’s adorned with feathers and bells. I ask Rob, who I know from writers’ group, who this is. ‘Feather Foot,’ he tells me with a grin.

  Feather Foot starts in on a turgid set of ballads that ramble and blend into each other. Rob says that Feather Foot comes and goes from the town, never staying more than a couple of months, but that on his last appearance at The Shack he was hustled off the stage when he started on a racist and anti-immigrant rant. I suspect there’d be a lot of people here who’d have sympathy for those views, but The Shack is clearly a politically neutral zone. Thankfully, tonight he sticks to singing (poorly, mind you) and eventually exits the stage, much to everyone’s relief.

  Three men with guitars follow. They’re also from the folk realm, but more colonial-era sea shanties. They seem to be enjoying themselves in an earnest kind of way, but none of them can sing and all three guitars sound the same (as do the songs). I’m profoundly bored. I turn to Beck, hopeful that she wants to go home, but she’s talking to Annette and I know there’s no chance.

  I refocus on the men on stage. At first I admire their gumption to get up and have a go, but as their interminable set grinds on, my admiration turns to irritation. What makes them think they have the right to subject us to this? My guitar mastery extended to long Eric Bogle ballads, which I thought sounded great. No one else did, and soon I stopped playing. Has someone not similarly enlightened these fellas? For fear of being a curmudgeon, I keep my counsel.

  The place continues to fill, and the crowd, largely indifferent to the drone from the stage, is getting rowdier. After what seems like an age the three balladeers finish, to desultory applause. Next up is a five-piece soul outfit. Now we’re talking. They open with a punchy Stevie Wonder number, and immediately there’s a crowd up and dancing. The musicians have quickly got ‘into the zone’. I feel a flush of jealousy at the sheer joy that must bring. I wish I’d pushed past the ballads. I wish I’d responded to the urgings of my ancient trumpet teacher at school to practise, and not succumbed to teenage laziness. I swallow my regrets with a second XXXX Gold.

  Too quickly the soul band get through their allotted time and make way for another five-piece band. At first this band also sounds promising – tight and loud, and the audience loves them. The lead singer tells us after the first song that he’s just come back from a tour of Afghanistan, singing for the troops. He punches his fist into the air and launches into ‘Khe Sanh’.

  I like ‘Khe Sanh’ but this guy’s swagger is making me uncomfortable. He’s short and sneery, and exudes superiority and aggression. It doesn’t seem to bother the others, who all join in as he claps his hands above his head and cheer raucously at the end of each song.

  After four songs I turn to Beck pleadingly: ‘Can we go?’

  Mercifully, she nods her assent.

  As we walk home we hear the singer’s voice float across the dry riverbed above the tinkle of glass and laughter. ‘This next one’s for our boys still over there …’

  The following day rolls along easily. I have a couple of long phone conversations with friends and family down south. The Sunday phone calls have become a lifesaver. Once I would spend Sunday afternoons writing letters – I remember my mum doing that when I was a child – but now it’s emails and phone calls.

  The calls connect me with the outside world and allow me to relax and accept the isolation of this place. Once the edge comes off the heat, I decide to dig some holes for the new plants Beck insisted we buy on the way home from yoga.

  ‘Don’t you think we have enough?’ I had asked.

  We’ve already planted at least thirty new trees and bushes, mainly natives – not that all have survived in the rocky soil and heat. Their maintenance, especially the watering, is already a burden.

  ‘I want to plant out the whole yard,’ Beck said. ‘Get rid of the lawn eventually.’

  Inwardly, I had groaned. Not just at the cost of the new plants and the work involved, but at what I suspect is her real motivation. Beck, consciously or unconsciously, is re-establishing her connection to Mount Isa. As each plant throws roots that penetrate the hard soil, so too are we pushing through the layers of resistance felt in any new town. With every plant that takes hold and grows, our commitment deepens. With each new hole I dig, it will become harder to leave.

  But whatever her motivation, I don’t actually mind. I like the physicality of the digging. I like seeing things take root and grow against the odds. And especially I like seeing Beck so happy.

  The heat is unrelenting. It’s Easter and still it’s hot – forty degrees hot. Diana, who rarely complains, tells me she doesn’t want to live through another summer. It’s hard not to think that would be the best option all round as I prepare to take off for Melbourne to visit the girls and to house-hunt.

  Georgina and Lucille, who have been living in our rented townhouse in Clifton Hill, have decided it’s time for them to move into share houses. ‘We’re sick of looking after your house and living amongst your ratty furniture and tacky knick-knacks,’ they announce. ‘We’re sick of doing you a favour.’

  Oh, how the narrative has changed! Fifteen months ago it was us doing them a favour. Affording them (and the couch surfers) the comfort and luxury of subsidised inner-city living in a fully furnished house, with a car, while they finish their degrees and cavort around the world on exchanges and internships. Suddenly they’re the ones doing us a favour, forced to remain at home and denied the opportunity to live with friends and become independent.

  It’s hard to tell how much of this narrative the girls actually believe. Regardless, we decide that, come August, when our lease expires, we won’t renew, and the girls agree to stay on until then. That means, though, that we have to decide what to do with a house full of furniture while we remain in Mount Isa. I investigate storage options and they’re prohibitively expensive, especially given we have no idea how long it will be before we come back – if we ever do.

  We give serious consideration to buying a place in Murwillumbah. Our good friends Pete and Dave live there, and they tell us it’ll be the next place to take off. We like northern New South Wales, and the idea of being close to the coast. But the thought of setting up somewhere new whenever Diana dies, and still being so far away from the kids, holds us back.

  We start looking in Daylesford, a place we know well, only a stone’s throw from Melbourne. Over Easter I find a place that’s just a street away from where we used to live. I send Beck the link and she gives her nod of approval – it’s structurally sound, centrally heated, and has a big shed to store our furniture – but a few days later she emails me again:

  I know this sounds completely nuts – but I really like it here. I
feel very content of late. I love my work and feel as though there are lots of opportunities here. The issue is the long, hot summer and the distance away from all our mates.

  Despite Beck’s hesitation, we decide to buy the Daylesford place. It satisfies our need to be tethered somewhere. We discuss what we could do to the house when we live there – open up the back and build a pizza oven, turn the shed into a bungalow, render the ugly bricks, plant out the front yard – but we know that it’s unlikely we ever will. Still, the fantasy allows us to continue to live in Mount Isa indefinitely, without the disquieting sense of floating free that keeps us awake at night.

  I pick up the consultant anthropologist and barrister from the airport, and we head straight to Camooweal, where we’re staying the night on our way to the Aboriginal community of Alpurrurulam, just over the border in the Northern Territory. The consultants have been engaged to assist with a native title matter that has become particularly fraught.

  I’m pleased to be getting out of town and out of the office. Over the last couple of weeks my relationship with head office has deteriorated further, and whatever sense of refreshment and resolve I brought back from my three weeks in Melbourne has completely dissipated. I know I have to start looking for other work in Mount Isa, and potentially elsewhere.

  We rise early the next day, and head south across the southern Barkly Tableland. We enter a vast Mitchell grass plain. I feel like we’re bouncing along the top of the world, with the country dipping away in every direction. After a couple of hours we re-enter low, scrubby woodland, and eventually we cross the Georgina River at a small ford. This is the river our daughter Georgina was named after.

  Beck’s dad, Ted, spent a lot of time fishing along this river, which starts north of here on the edge of the gulf and runs south through the Channel Country, and, when flooding, merges with the Diamantina before flowing on to Lake Eyre in South Australia. I’m in awe of the magnitude of this drainage system, which covers one-fifth of the continent. Just up from the crossing is a large billabong called Lake Nash, from which the massive surrounding station takes its name. In the 1980s, four square kilometres of scrubby bush, well away from the waterhole, were excised from the station to create the Aboriginal town of Alpurrurulum.