And here’s a funny thing. The mainlanders say you can always tell a Tasmanian because he ‘loses his H’s at Hamilton and picks them up at Ararat’. Daddy used to do that. ‘I’ve hearned more money than you’re hever likely to,’ he used to say.
Googie’s niece Mary Grant and her husband Jim made me welcome as only country people can. Mary thought the best way to spread the word that we were looking for a jackeroo from the twenties called Reg Greer was to activate the bush telegraph by having a party. People came from far and wide, bringing dishes for supper, along with good humour and kindly interest. They were good talkers, as the generation that grew up before mass media always is. The result was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to. Mary’s daughter came home from the Dalby hospital, where she was nursing, to be in the fun, but really to visit the two horses that looked on from under the trees. She was wearing a thin dress of white lawn, but she made no move to change or even to put boots on before going out to the horses. When she appeared on the white horse’s back in the doorway of the house she had not bothered to saddle him either. I understood then why there was a ramp up to the back door of the kitchen: the horses were in the habit of walking through the house to say hello. A half-grown golden pullet dozed on the window sill by the kitchen sink, opening one eye and cheeping if we splashed her when we were rinsing the glasses. Nothing more different than the cruel world of the road trains could be imagined. When the beautiful girl rode her horse up to the door and looked in to greet the guests, the visitors crowded to speak to this human-animal hybrid. The horse nibbled their palms with his soft lips.
I remembered one of the few interchanges I ever had with my father that had the grammar of conversation. I had come back from staying at the Hickeys’ farm in Berrigan, in the Riverina, where for the first time I had seen the Australian country-woman in her element. Mrs Hickey was usually up in the morning at five, stoked up the firestove, put the men’s boots in the oven to warm, stirred the oatmeal and left it to cook, brought in the cow and milked her, fed the fowls, collected the eggs, put the heavy iron skillet on the stove and fried the bacon and put the bacon in the oven to keep hot, and broke a dozen eggs into the skillet and by then the men were down and ate and went and it was six thirty. I remember the routine because I tried it myself one morning. Mrs Hickey and the girls went along with my idea and let me get on with it, sink or swim. The men noticed nothing in particular, but when they sat down at the breakfast table that morning I was prouder than I have ever been in my life. The only problem had been the cow. I was an inexperienced milker and she didn’t like my hands on her teats so first she wouldn’t come to me when I called her and then I had to ask one of the girls to strip her for me. I liked milking with my head against the cow’s warm flank, and the sweet Jersey smell of her and the swish of the hot milk onto the steaming bucket and the warm smooth udder in my cold morning hands, but I could not say that I was good at it. It takes practice and muscles that don’t develop until you’ve milked a month or two.
When I came home I told Dad that these country-women were real people. If we lived in the country I reckoned Mother’s energy would be absorbed, and not frittered away in flightiness. ‘I didn’t know women could be like that,’ I said. ‘Like what?’ ‘Resourceful, straightforward, capable, funny, proud, independent, you know.’ I might have said, ‘Not vain, capricious, manipulative, unreliable, girlish, affected, infantile….’ I might have, but I didn’t. The Female Eunuch was not yet to be written. I was only fifteen. Daddy didn’t answer that if Mother had been like that he wouldn’t have fancied her. He probably didn’t want me telling him he had a depraved taste in womanflesh. Nevertheless I thought it.
When the Grants’ party broke up I had more invitations to stay than I could count and I’d given out even more pictures of Reg Greer with details of my quest on the back. None of these people seemed to find my quest odd or incomprehensible. Blood lines were their business. ‘Follow a family likeness,’ said Mary. ‘Flesh and bone can’t lie.’ She might have been thinking of the light chestnut out under the pepper trees, a racehorse who still carried the narrow muzzle of an Arab sire a hundred generations ago. Mary herself had the wide-set blue Bassingthwaighte eyes and cheekbones; when she sat with Googie and her mother, their obvious likeness made light of the fact that all three had different surnames. Which suggests of course that I should be making this search through my father’s dam rather than his sire.
Googie did not remember Reg Greer; the round blue Bassingthwaighte eyes were sad but there was no shadow of doubt in them. But the hunt was up. Between them the guests at Mary’s party had connections in every part of the state and beyond. The question remained of why Reg Greer dropped Googie’s name to impress the child bride, but Googie had been quite famous in the twenties and thirties when he and his horses were known on every country race track. Googie Bassingthwaighte is not a name to forget after all. Which left the second of mother’s incantations to investigate.
There were fewer dead kangaroos on the road from Cunnamulla to Thargomindah, because there is little traffic going that way nowadays. On the outskirts of Cunnamulla, on the football pitch in fact, I saw my first live kangaroo of the trip. She stood astonished, wringing her tiny paws, her large ears craned towards me like radar screens. I hoped it meant that my luck was turning. As the animals and birds watched me drive quietly by in the empty blue morning, I felt my spirits rise. I would discover that Daddy was the son of the owner of the Thargomindah Herald maybe, I would find him riding in the picnic races in 1922, or winning a prize in a fancy dress ball or singing ‘Danny-Boy’ in a benefit concert, I imagined Thargomindah as a nucleus of late-Victorian buildings, a town hall, a church, a cemetery, a pub with deep verandahs. I passed wide blue lakes where brolgas and herons stalked, and groves of emerald grass where emus grazed head down like sheep, their feather skirts cut off straight at the exact level of the grass. From the distance they looked like black rocks jutting up. I saw no cattle. No vehicle passed me coming one way or the other. The first vehicle I saw belonged to the Thargomindah shire council. It was parked at the side of a floodway with the door open. A good-looking Aborigine dressed only in cotton shorts was lolling in the driver’s seat with his feet on the dashboard. A younger Aborigine was washing his dog in a waterhole by the side of the causeway. They looked up and stared when they saw a middle-aged woman at the wheel of a flash town car with no ’roo bars. I stared when I saw that though Thargomindah was little more than a grid of strips of metalled road in seas of red gravel it had a by-pass. I took the by-pass because I wanted breakfast and the usual offices. Scrubbie’s, which offered toilets and showers, was on the by-pass.
As I pushed open the door, a surprisingly sweet and low voice bade me good morning. It belonged to a blond woman in a leopard-spotted nylon negligee who was drinking coffee, smoking and reading the paper at a table just inside the door. She had very clear eyes of an unusual shade of grey-blue.
Her husband came up behind her and offered to cook my breakfast. Keeping her back turned to him she widened her eyes in surprise. I didn’t need the strange deadness of her face and body to tell me that something was terribly wrong. As she sat down at my table for a yarn, she sighed. Then she explained in a slightly flurried way, ‘I need my vitamins. I’m out. I’ve lost four and a half stone in six months and I took six Vitamin E a day. I think that’s why I didn’t go scraggy.’ She pushed up the sleeve of the negligee, and indeed she hadn’t gone scraggy. ‘How old are you?’ I asked. ‘Forty-seven,’ she said. ‘I’m forty-nine,’ said I. ‘They were good years, weren’t they?’ she said, and laughed. The laugh erupted in a noise like a rockfall. She glanced at the dour man standing at the skillet and grimaced, as she swallowed the commotion in her chest. When the rattling and grating had subsided, she lit another cigarette. The only other person in the place was her father.
I told her my story. ‘Thargomindah and Jackson,’ she said. ‘Well, there’s a Jackson’s Creek here,’ she said and pointed we
st. ‘That’s where they found the oil.’
‘Whose station would that have been?’
‘Bill Carr’s the man you want.’ She got up and went straight to the telephone. ‘He’s there. They’re not supposed to open till nine, but he’s usually there by seven or so.’
I’d noticed the shire hall on my reconnaissance of the town. It wasn’t hard to remember it, as the only other building of any size was the school. Up on the by-pass there was nothing but the heat ripple to impede the view, because the two service stations, of which Scrubbie’s was one, stood in huge red gravel parking lots where road trains could be turned out to graze while their drivers got the nosebags on. ‘Beer,’ the signs said, ‘Ice.’ There were no road trains standing with their loads of cattle in the sun which was a mercy. Scrubbie showed me her bird book, because I was a bit puzzled about some of the jewelled oddities that had greeted me along the road. Then I went to see Mr Carr.
He showed me on his wall map that Kihee station would have been the one that could have been called ‘Thargomindah and Jackson’s Creek’ but actually everyone knew it as Carwardine’s. I asked if he had a file of the Thargomindah Herald. Well, not a file exactly. He had a few numbers. Three to be exact. They were preserved for posterity in a cardboard carton in the drawing office. The fine red Mulga dust that sifts in under doors and around windows, even when you don’t have the kind of dust-storm that means you have to eat your dinner under a table covered with a wet sheet, had rubbed into holes the corners where the papers had been folded. ‘I had some photographs,’ said Mr Carr, ‘but someone who thought they had a better right to them took them away.’ I could not say that I was sorry that the Thargomindah archive was not still at the mercy of the Bulloo River that occasionally boils over and laps against the door sills of the Thargomindah houses or the fierce drying winds that suck the red dust up in eddies that reach tens of miles into the sky as they bowl from ridge to ridge.
Nevertheless Mr Carr’s feelings were not hard to understand.
In 1876 when the town was first surveyed, divided into a hundred lots in ten blocks along five streets running up from ‘Adria Esplanade’ overlooking the Bulloo River, mud-brick buildings of handsome proportions were built at the intersections. The main thoroughfare was called after the founder of Thargomindah station, Dowling Street. In 1872, Vincent Dowling was speared by blacks from a community called Bitharra while mustering cattle out near what is now Wongetta. In revenge the whole community of three hundred people was massacred by state troopers. Nowadays I was told blacks avoid the place; certainly few if any black faces have ever appeared in the annual photographs taken at Thargomindah state school. It is too late now to rename the main street of Thargomindah, Bitharra Street, for nowadays nobody walks in the streets. While they were drilling for oil at Jackson’s Creek things livened up a bit, but once the well is capped only a pumping station will be left out among the purple ridges to the west, an iron bird dipping its sightless bill into the underground stream.
In the 1880s it seemed that Thargomindah would have to grow, for all the cattle to the west came here to the first green pasture for thousands of miles. The Thargomindah Herald and Cooper’s Creek Advertiser began printing in 1884. The school had 42 pupils in 1884. In 1915 someone visited the bush metropolis by Cobb and Co coach and remained impressed:
‘Thargomindah has a population of about 100, a newspaper! and a good one…. A post and telegraphic office, a hospital, a State School… a branch of the Commercial Bank of Sydney, three stores… racing, cricket and tennis clubs, and two hotels, the Thargomindah and the Club. The town is reticulated from the artesian bore, which also drives the electric light plant which lights the town. It was curious to drive along the main street of this far western town and see lamps a-glimmer with electric light, and the stores and hotels illuminated by the light the power for generating which came from the lower regions several thousand feet below.’
The anonymous correspondent would have been even more surprised to return to this go-ahead far-western town in 1991 and find no hotel, no aerated water maker, no bookseller, no butcher, no carpenter, no chemist, no draper, no hairdresser, no newspaper (for the Herald folded in 1936), no watchmaker or jeweller, in fact no shops at all, when all of those things were in place in 1891. The Royal Hotel, where the Queensland governor Lord Lamington was lavishly entertained with imported wines and fresh fruit on a richly dressed table, burned down in 1906. Speedy’s department store burned down in 1914, was rebuilt and burned down again in 1933, and was not rebuilt again. Two shed-like churches, Protestant and Catholic, have appeared in its place. McColl’s department store simply disappeared. The Club Hotel burnt down in 1914, in 1947 and in 1972. Each time it was rebuilt more cheaply and on a reduced scale. Now it is the Club Hotel-Motel with accommodation for a handful of truck-drivers and tourists on the trail of Burke and Wills.
Nowadays Thargomindah is on a life-support machine. ‘There’s nobody on the land any more,’ said Scrubbie’s husband. ‘At Nockatunga Station in the thirties there were three hundred men employed fulltime just in trapping rabbits, so that’ll give you some idea.’ Everyone went on the land when the Australian economy collapsed in the nineties and again in the thirties. The only memory we have of the rabbit-ohs is that sometimes at bush fairs there’s a rabbit-skinning contest. I forget what the record is, less than two minutes.
Reading of the succession of new starts and false recoveries that are the history of Thargomindah, I couldn’t avoid the recurring suspicion that there was more to the story than the tyranny of distance and intemperate climate. Bad diet kept the children small and ill and stupid, and dust gave them trachoma; bitter hardship explained the burial of whole families at a time in the Thargomindah graveyard. Most of them lie in unmarked graves for there was no one to mourn them and no money for a monument. But no one was left to perform the obsequies for the Bitharra people either.
As I stood on one of the blue ridges above Jackson’s Creek, looking west over an endless succession of shimmering ridges, I felt a strange cold fear. This is the country that killed Burke and Wills and Hume…. Becker, Stone and Purcell died at Koorliatto waterhole. This is not just hard country, it is angry and alien.
Before I left I went to Scrubbie’s for petrol. ‘As soon as I can sell this place,’ she said in the privacy of the blinding sun on the dusty forecourt, ‘I’m getting out.’ I knew what was coming. ‘He’s a brilliant bloke, but he’s having a love affair with a Four X bottle and I won’t stand for it. He’s bashed me once and once is enough.’
I knew from the way he stole around the café that he was contrite, but it was a drunkard’s contrition, morning contrition. I felt sorry for him, but I felt sorrier for her with her brave blond hair and her petrel-blue eyes.
‘As soon as I can unload this, I’m going to my kids. I’ve got good kids,’ she said and smiled, but the smile did not touch her eyes. She was one of my proud, independent country-women and she had been beaten. She was generous, and lively, and loving, and hard-working, and she had been beaten like a jade. Australian dogs and Australian women will work for you for years with never a kind word, but don’t try beating either of them.
‘Do you reckon I can take this car over the Hungerford Crossing?’ I asked her.
‘Have you got water?’ she asked. She brought a two-litre plastic bottle full of water and off I went, through coolibah and gidyea, mulga and lignum, the car juddering over corrugations or flouncing through the kind of deep silky dust that turns to bottomless jelly in the wet. The dirt road was deeply rutted in places but by straddling the ruts I managed to keep all my wheels on the ground most of the time. Scrubbie had given me four hours to Hungerford but I made it in two. I kept an anxious eye on the sky because my attendant storm was snickering somewhere on the horizon to the south-east.
The Hungerford pub has the kind of cavernous bar that feels empty with anything less than a couple of hundred men in broad-brimmed hats and elastic-sided boots jostling for a drink. A
young woman in a sleeveless pink dress pulled me a beer and put a meat pie in the microwave. The only other people there were her two boys, home from school in Cunnamulla, who were watching television rather restlessly on the other side of the vast horseshoe-shaped counter, behind which a dozen sweating barmen were meant to have been pulling beer as fast as the dry-throated drovers could swill it down in the only pub in two hundred and fifty miles. As I ate my pie, two jackeroos came in, full of excitement about the dead file snake on the road. It was big to start with, but the sun was turning it into a boa constrictor, as its wide belly swelled up with gas.
As far as I could tell, the primal elder was placated for the nonce. For several days there had been no small disasters. The bar was wood and I was leaning on it, so I felt I could make this calculation with reasonable impunity. Just to be on the safe side I thought I should top up with unleaded petrol. The hotel-keeper looked a little uneasy. I’d have to drive round the back of the pub and into his backyard where the petrol was kept in drums. ‘Three weeks ago I asked for an overhead counter,’ he said in disgust, as he prized the cap off a new drum. The metal tore and gashed his palm. The blood welled and began to drip. He shook it off and it dripped again. The pump did not want to fit into the hole in the top of the drum. By the time he had begun to jerk the handle back and forth, the drum, the pump, the grass around us and the tree that shaded the drums were all splattered with gore.
‘It pulls a litre at a stroke,’ he said. When we heard the petrol swish into the tank we began counting. I was relieved when we passed the ten-litre mark, because I hardly liked to put him to so much trouble for so little, but I knew that the tank was only a quarter down. We passed the twenty-litre mark, and then the thirty. At thirty-eight dollars’ worth we stopped. I paid and turned on the ignition. The tank was exactly as it had been when I pulled up at the drums. Not a drop had gone in, despite all the swishing and splashing. It was more than I could do to go back into the pub where the hotel-keeper was at last having his hand seen to and tell him that it was all to do again. Cravenly I drove up to the twelve-foot white gate in the vermin-proof fence and let myself into New South Wales. Let the elder have his laugh, I thought. But the elder had much better up his sleeve.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 25