Shearers' Motel

by Roger McDonald

  Whenever Darryl heard something he recognised he muttered, ‘Aw, yeah,’ or ‘That’s Mum’s favourite’. He was a lot younger than fourteen inside himself, and couldn’t help feeling it. His mother would have been heartsore with pride to see him, her young man — he surely felt that.

  Cookie could tell, as he drove, what Darryl was thinking: wishing the youth counsellor hadn’t driven him down to McDonald’s, there in the Hill, and waited with him so publicly, like a parent or a teacher, until Harold tromped in, giving him the smile and saying, ‘So this is the young pup? Hand im over.’ Wishing everything about him didn’t say young pup. Knowing he was beginning work-life at the bottom of a pit. Knowing he wasn’t going to be paid. (That was arranged with the youth people.) He didn’t feel like any young pup, though — he was tall, and was always told he looked older than he was. Mum always said so.

  Harold wagged a finger again: ‘One rule I have with you young fellas is no drinking, either. I see you with a stubby in your hand I’ll whip you, no questions asked.’

  Darryl knew that people like Harold, no matter how softly they talked, spoke the truth. They had a way of treating pups. They used a piece of four-by-two on them, taking them behind the sheds when they weren’t any use any more.

  Way down the road they stopped for a piss. One Hundred and One Strings whined through the open doors of the Hi-Lux as they separated out in the dark. Floodwaters lapped an embankment. The moon coming up over the Darling Anabranch dredged deeper, heavier thoughts from sticky mud and grey straggly coolabahs than any easy listening could ever muster — the moon like a Beethoven symphony rising through streaky, fair weather clouds, pounding through space like a stone, scouring a path on the water.

  ‘Ain’t that something,’ enthused Rocco. ‘Whee!’

  ‘Australian moon. Beautiful moon,’ said Krystal.

  ‘We’ve got a better one in New Zealand,’ said Harold.

  Harold removed his thongs, hitched up his shorts, and waded out into the water, swivelling from side to side in a hypnotic, trudging fashion, splashing the surface with the flat of his hand.

  After this stop there was no more radio, no more talk. Harold snored like a grampus. Bodies slumped in the twin cab.

  He drove using elbow and wrist in an almost fixed position, holding the wheel in a trancelike state. It was like steering a star-course. Harold and Rocco’s ancestors had moved from island to island through the centuries, living on the sea, becoming part of the sea. At the Anabranch, Rocco had whistled Harold back before he disappeared into the dark, his head swarming with mosquitoes. Maybe he’d been out there reclaiming some missing part of himself, the dreaming, drifting quantity that was always buried in the worker. ‘Cookie,’ he stirred briefly from his slumbers, ‘when we get there, let’s go down to Port MacDonnell and see if we can’t get some of them crayfish for our tea.’

  At the start of this drive, the sun had set over dusty plains, where sheep-tracks led like wheel spokes to water tanks. Through the night the sun passed under saltbush plains, muddy lakes, orange groves, vineyards, under the River Murray, under thickets of mallee. It rose, still in sheep country, deep to the south, west of the Grampians somewhere, splintering through red gums. The air was scented with moisture. The grass was juicy, thick and green. Thistles luxuriated along the roadsides, broad leaves striated like slugs. There was no such thing as grass where they had come from: no plenty. The distance involved was the same as from Brisbane to Townsville, or the full length of the North Island of New Zealand. It was like driving from John O’Groats to Land’s End, or from New York to Florida. All night there had been hardly any other traffic — just occasional headlights descending from the far horizon.

  At this time of year, every year, Harold did almost the whole stretch of this route every weekend. From wherever he shore he regularly drove home, trying to keep his family together, taking his children to the Mormon church on Sunday mornings, before heading down to Victoria again. A truckdriver recommended pills, which Harold took to keep himself awake. When he was told they were drugs and he might become addicted he said, ‘Well, I won’t be taking them again’ — then maybe shouldering the opinion aside because he had to, blinking away exhaustion, scrabbling his big fist into the glove box next time round, taking what was needed.

  At long intervals in the night those other headlights materialised in the far sky and interminably sank down. When they bore past eventually they did so blindingly, with a whomp of air, as if something had leapt flashing from the dark, from the deep, from the waters of where they were going.

  TIDELINE

  They camped at a shed where there was no work for a cook, and after a few hours sleep drove the last half-hour to the coast.

  Sailing ships came this way last century, beating up from Antarctic waters, following the Great Circle route from England over thousands of miles of inhospitable sea. It was a place of wind-flattened cypress pines and small-windowed weatherboard houses — cold, wet and miserable for much of the year.

  Today it was impossible to imagine storms and wreckage, though. The air was warm and still. In sheltered places it was hot. The sea heaved with a rainbow oiliness under a diffuse, hazy sun, with swathes of kelp in glassy rockpools, and basaltic, cone-shaped rocks glittering with fringes of salt.

  It was full spring, with apple trees flowering on roadsides, hawthorn bushes ablaze with white blossom, and carpets of yellow capeweed on hillsides. They were in one of the few parts of Australia with reliable rainfall. March flies buzzed around bog-holes. Wild turnip was in flower. A flow of milky-warm air moved across undulating, treeless pasture, where creeks held rioting watercress, and fencelines offered milk thistle. Every declivity showed a glimpse of the sea. The Kiwis said it was like home. They fanned out into paddocks, collecting armfuls of green, stuffing it into garbage bags.

  An arrangement had been made with mates to go collecting sea urchins and abalone behind an ocean farm. They parked near a road quarry while Harold went in another car searching for a rendezvous. He came back after half an hour. ‘I found em. It’s not happening. They’re all still half-cut from last night.’ So they went to the local post office feeling let down, to make phone calls and arrange something else. Harold’s mystifying announcements about plan changes bedevilled all his dealings; but just then a cavalcade of vehicles pulled in. A middle-aged man, Reuben, led the way in a new Falcon station wagon.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Harold reported back. ‘It’s on. Reuben says it’s okay.’

  Reuben, said Harold, was a wool broker who had come from New Zealand twenty-five years ago, had worked as a shearer and a contractor, and then built up his own business in Australia, travelling around in a chromium-plated Mack with high aluminium sides, buying wool for cash at the shed door.

  They headed out of town in procession. Other cars appeared from side roads and joined the line. Everything was serene. Perfect. What was wrong with him that he felt displaced? This was not the trajectory he had set himself when he loaded the truck back at Braidwood almost a year ago, steering north by northwest, willing himself to keep going till the wheels fell off and he ploughed to rest in the interior somewhere. The first images of landscape he ever knew went out in that same direction, at the stillest time of year, high summer. All life was back in the baking earth, under dry leaves, in crevices of bark, on the undersides of stones. His soul’s view snaked northwest over bleached grass and dry earth to a horizon of shimmering grey ironbarks. He wanted to be back at Gumbank rather than here.

  Here, on the southern coast of Australia, puffs of Wilcannia dust shook through holes in the floor of the Hi-Lux. Fine sand filmed the dashboard. His clothes reeked of Sunlight soap from a grey, cold-water wash in an outdoor tub overlooking the Darling. He remembered getting to the station, waking on his bedroll in the back of the truck, watching a big goanna feeling its way up the trunk of a river red gum whose old shattered crown was like a city; and then getting up and walking where he pleased, following a wagtail from log
to log, as if a secret was going to be revealed to him soon.

  Always that.

  And then Harold offering him this ride. Here, what it was, was that it was more like England than Australia, with goldfinches, larks, sparrows, elms, lindens, willows. All things were known. Even the haze seemed English — contented, doozy, over-with, somehow. Clover flowers stank, phalaris, cocksfoot and ryegrass erupted green. He had been to England and had felt enclosed there. He had never crossed the Tasman, but if this was what New Zealand was like, too, then give him red earth by preference, a line of emus stalking the nothingness, because he wanted sparser equivalents of himself. ‘Man’s like the earth, his hair like grasse is grown, his veins the rivers are, his heart the stone.’

  Twelve cars and the Hi-Lux slid between pine windbreaks on a dusty track, and snaked across lumpy green cow pasture. Each vehicle stubbed against the fender of the next in case of a wrong turn. Arms hung from windows and puffy, burr-thickened, leathery shearers’ fingers jabbed the air. Come this way. Stay together. There was no one else around. A run-down farmhouse stood on a low ridge. Dogs barked in pens. Cattle morosely licked mineral supplement blocks. The idea of a fishing inspector hung in the air, a man within siren-reach somewhere, all his malice centred on Kiwis, who were holding their breath, hardly believing the day they had for themselves at last.

  Across saline flats and broken-down fences the cars bounced on spongy cattle-grass. He saw Harold’s face framed in a car window, wearing the same dazed expression he had worn the night he waded into the flooded Darling. This was how his children should be seeing him, but rarely would. Georgina would have liked to be on these six- to eight-week runs, through this lush, properly grassed country. She was scornful of the word grass in the inland town. ‘What grass?’ It was coarse, sharp, unpleasant, and grew on carefully tended lawns, with copious waterings. Georgina had come down this way in previous years, cooking and rouseabouting. She might still come this year if Harold sent for her, which he would do if it suited work demands — if he needed an emergency rousie, say, or a fill-in cook. Then he would call her and get her on the bus quick-smart.

  Gaps in the dunes appeared. The marram grass parted. In twos and threes, and with a conspiratorial burst of acceleration, each car of the procession found its way through to the sea.

  Plastic net-bags were unloaded, flippers and wetsuits were taken out, air tanks and face masks and thick rubber gloves were sorted. Women sat among the rocks with small children and a newborn baby in a pink jump-suit and floppy shade hat.

  Louella appeared, wearing a Harley T-shirt and a purple Indian cotton skirt. She split off from the rest, chin on her chest, black hair falling down over her face to hide herself from enquiring eyes. I don’t want to talk to none of yers. Why, would be pointless to ask. Louella’s people — these people here today — thought she’d be better off in New Zealand at her age, but if they thought that, why didn’t they take up a collection and send her home? (The answer was, if they did, she’d throw the money back at them.) Louella gave out unhappiness with every slow glance — morose, mournful, depressed, moony. She settled into a hot little corner of rocks away from everyone else, but then after a while got up, advancing to the water’s edge. Tucking up her dress and trailing her brown ankles through salty tidepools, she had a melancholy attraction. She was the same age as his daughters. He wanted to go and talk to her the way he had seen Lenny talk to her lots of times, sitting on the bonnet of the ute under a peppercorn tree or on a riverbank. Their heads close. Their shoulders touching. Lenny smiling quizzically. Louella twisting jet-black hair round her fingers and grinning crookedly, shaking her head, smiling, even laughing a little, having pleasure drawn out of her bit by bit. He had seen Louella unreservedly happy only once. It was on a Saturday afternoon when everyone else had gone to town. She lay on her stomach on a mattress in the quarters at Gograndli Station, chin cupped on hands, ankles crossed, her boyfriend’s sandy, close-cropped head twined with her beautiful dark one, two teenagers engrossed in idle comparisons of likes and dislikes. She had given Cookie a small wave and smiled when he passed down the lane between the bakingly hot galvanised iron buildings. One weekend she went all the way to Holbrook with her boyfriend, Aussie. There was a barbecue and she met his parents on their wheat property. Something went wrong: some carelessly wounding word from an older woman (you could bet) over the shashlik and rissoles and Griffith lambrusco. It would have spoiled things for Louella, whatever it was, triggering her lavalike thought, her burning river of resentment. Up yerselves yer pake bitches. The same goes for all of yers.

  Above the tideline, silver-haired Reuben hung back from the rest, not getting involved yet, standing with legs apart, arms folded, wearing a white canvas tennis hat. He was never quite alone. Men approached him at respectful intervals. There was Ulysses, ‘the typical old Mo’hi’ — about ten years older than Harold.

  Harold walked up the beach and consulted Reuben with his hands clasped behind his back; grave, judicious, thirty-five year old Harold. He stood the way ministers used to stand talking to parishioners outside churches. Maybe they were talking about Louella, considering her welfare. But more likely they were talking about wool prices, the oversupply of sheep numbers, and the phenomenon people were noticing that season, that down here in some of the richest sheep towns known — meccas for shearers from all over Australasia — there were shearers sitting on their backsides because there was no work for them.

  Rocco and his younger brother Bradshaw came and spoke to Reuben. They had a military, athletic bearing. With his trim moustache and slicked-back short hair, Rocco looked like a guardsman awaiting orders for the Western Front, while Bradshaw bounced up and down beside him with the quick-footed nervous energy of a boxer or a rap dancer. They spoke in Maori when they talked to Reuben. It was the first time Cookie had heard the language used. He commented on this to Harold, who said that Rocco and Bradshaw spoke Maori better than English. Then Harold put a hand up to his face, covering his eyes, peering through his fingers. It was a gesture he used in the sheds when he had to contradict himself and countermand previous decisions. ‘I am really happy being with these guys. All my old ways are coming back to me. I feel this is how I want things to be all the time. This is what I don’t like about being in Australia. I don’t want my children to miss out on this in their growing up.’

  There on the beach people were different from how they were in the sheds. Their worker-carapaces were off. Maybe he hadn’t really looked at them before — only seen them at their jobs, making the mistake of thinking that people were always only or mostly what they did. Here there was a different feeling about life. Gestures harmonised with the bright white sand and the hot jumbled rocks, and the deep wide rockpools of the reef where men and girls climbed into the water and shoved off towards the thin blue line of the horizon.

  He watched Harold making his way out. He was wearing green shorts and a football guernsey, and old split sandshoes. He was back in his wading motion again. Soon he was up to his belly, his chest, his shoulders, facing out to sea. His dark round head bobbed and sank, rose and shook itself. As he moved along he talked to snorkellers out on his flank somewhere, bubbles of his laughter (it could be described as jolly) floating back across the calm water for a hundred metres or more, a settled, soothing sound, so relaxed and appropriate and in place that any sense of unbelonging had no strength, no further relevance.

  He felt sorry for the expedients that made lives what they were, shattered them into a thousand discrepancies and differences, when all that was wanted was coherence. He felt it for himself on the Greyhound bus taking him all the way back to Broken Hill, then on to Wilcannia. He stepped down at a crossroads on the floodplain, and started walking south along the river road in the emptiness of evening. He knew there would soon be a shearer coming along, and there was.

  LOST

  He stepped away from the Gumbank quarters, slithered down a slope of old bottles and rusted cans.

  Looked back
. A glance along the skyline revealed cook’s room, meat house, the jumble of huts. Seen from outside, the place held its purpose like a secret. It held an aura of the last century — soon to be the century before last. The crumbling chimney was a haven for wagtails and swallows. Deadly nightshade invaded footways. Dust seeped under doors. The heaving cry of crows scraped across tin. This image of romantic decay was remote from ordinary life. Split images of place: this perspective, and what happened in there day after day for the three weeks of shearing, contested with images from the musty, rat-chewed pages of On the Wool Track, written eighty years ago by a Sydney Morning Herald journalist, C. E. W. Bean. He had been reading it on and off for months. Even during the past week and a half, when he’d camped on the riverbank, waiting for Harold and the team to return from down south, he had read very little.

  He looked back at the roofline. The overseer’s room (like the cook’s room) was detached from the rest of the quarters: two bedrooms and an anteroom with old wooden dresser, and wicker chairs. Bean would surely have checked it out on his way through Gumbank in the 1910s. (He pictured a pair of authority figures, overseer and classer, wearing white cotton coats, stroking long moustaches, giving Bean the drum.) The reality last night: grinder in action, the room packed — the classer sprawled in one chair, the cook ‘checking things out’ in the other, power cord snaking outside to generator, Lenny wearing deershooter’s checked jacket, the classer in Ugh boots, Matthew, sacked that day, but not caring, hating shed work. Harold, back from supper with the owners, in R. M. Williams boots, moleskins, quality wool sweater, reminiscing affectionately above the scream of metal and shower of sparks about other shearers: Old Ulysses — ‘Been here fourteen years and still the typical Mo’hi: woollen sweater with sleeves cut off, tracksuit pants, joggers with the socks wrapped round them’, Arnie — ‘Oooh. Watch out when he’s had too much. Nail up the doors. Lock him in the boot.’