by Lorna Hendry
James had been quiet during most of the conversation, but then he admitted that he wasn’t looking forward to returning to Melbourne. He knew when we got home at the end of this year he would have to go back to a regular job and he wouldn’t ever see this much of us again. That’s when he would be homesick. He’d be missing his best friends – us. We were all silent after that, staring into the dying flames, wondering just what ‘going home’ would be like, and how much we would miss this life.
As I helped Dylan into his sleeping bag later he said, ‘I felt different tonight. I felt happy. I could feel all this warmth and love coming out from you and Dad all the way over to us.’ And in case I didn’t get it, he added, ‘Like flies to a sandwich.’
After a quick visit to the Wolf Creek meteorite crater, made famous by the 2005 horror film based loosely on the murder of Peter Falconio, and an overnight stop in Halls Creek, the first town at the Western Australian end of the Tanami Road, we decided to make amends for missing the Bungle Bungles the previous year. At the turn-off from the Great Northern Highway to Purnululu National Park, 100 kilometres north of Halls Creek, several caravans and camper trailers were parked by the side of the road, and for good reason. The narrow, 53-kilometre track was notoriously rocky and corrugated and it took several hours of very slow driving to navigate the dry creek crossings, steep climbs and tight corners.
When we reached the surprisingly new and modern visitor centre at the end of the track, we were allocated a campsite a few kilometres south of the rounded rock formations that we had come to see. It was early in the season and the park had just opened, so there were only a few other camps set up and none near us. We put up the tent in the shade of a huge gum tree and settled in for an early night.
The next morning we began exploring some of the walking trails. We wandered along narrow sandy tracks that led into cool, dark chasms where the sunlight only managed to get in for an hour or so each day. We tested the peculiar acoustics at Cathedral Gorge, where sound travels around the huge curved walls so that a whisper at one end of the gorge can be clearly heard at the other. The track detoured around the base of the domes and we craned our necks trying to make out the orange and grey bands in the sandstone above us. The striped effect is due to different amounts of moisture in the sandstone. The drier layers display their oxidised iron content with their orange colour. The grey bands are the layers that hold more water; bacteria grow on these surfaces and turn them grey.
On the second day, we did schoolwork in the shade of a wooden shelter in the car park at the start of the Echidna Chasm walk. Helicopters buzzed above us and a sign warned walkers not to wave at them unless you were in need of emergency assistance. After an hour or so of sweating, literally, over maths sheets, we packed up the books and walked through the narrow gaps between the domes. We soon decided that there was no doubt that the best views were from the air. Reasoning that we were about to spend six months in a place where there would absolutely nothing to spend any money on, we drove to the airstrip that afternoon and booked a ridiculously expensive half-hour helicopter flight.
Our second helicopter ride was less terrifying than the one from Mitchell Falls the previous year. This time the chopper had doors and all four of us had seatbelts. From the ground, the famous beehive mounds had appeared to be clustered closely together, but from above we could see that there were hundreds of them that stood alone, separated by eons of erosion. In the middle of the range, where we had been walking, the sandstone folded and rippled, forming gorges that hid cool dark waterholes.
By Anzac Day we were in Fitzroy Crossing. James and the boys spent the afternoon in the camp kitchen watching Collingwood play against Essendon so I had some rare time alone in the tent. As I settled down to read, a familiar accent drifted across the campground.
‘Whit dae ye mean ye didnae bring a hammer?’
‘Oh, it disnae matter. Ah’ll just use a big rock. Look, there’s wun right here. That’ll do the job no problem.’
‘What’s goin’ on with this wee tent? There’s ropes and zips everywhere. I cannae work it out.’
I peeked at them from above my book. They were definitely Scottish, I knew that already, but they looked as if they could actually belong to my family. I wandered over with our hammer. ‘Would you like to borrow this?’
‘Thanks, love’, said the tiny, dark-haired woman. ‘This bampot here forgot to bring oors.’
‘Do you need a hand?’
‘Dae ye know how tae put up one aw these?’ she asked, waving her hand at a pile of blue silk and white rope.
As we worked, Linda and Andy explained that this was their first camping trip. I feigned surprise. They had only been in Australia for a few months, having just moved from Glasgow to Broome. This weekend was their first opportunity to explore their new home. They had driven 400 kilometres that day – a distance that was extraordinary to them – to have a look at Fitzroy Crossing.
We got the tent up and Linda peered anxiously inside. ‘Ah’m terrified aw creepy-crawlies’, she confessed. ‘Dae ye think anything can get in there?’ I assured her it would be fine, but suggested she close all the insect screens that Andy had unzipped and thrown open ‘tae get some fresh air in’.
By the time James and the boys got back, we had been invited for a drink after dinner.
‘Dae you two like ice-cream?’ Linda asked the boys when we arrived, following the Scottish tradition of plying children with sweets at every opportunity. They assured her that they did.
I looked around, confused. I had helped them unpack their small car and hadn’t noticed an esky. ‘How did you bring ice-cream?’ I asked.
‘Och, that’s an auld trick’, said Andy. ‘Dae ye not know it?’ He lifted out a mass of soggy paper from a cardboard box. ‘Ye wrap it up in newspaper. It’s a brilliant insulator.’
The boys watched, fascinated, as he peeled away the paper to reveal a container of chocolate ice-cream. When he opened the lid, the contents were completely liquid. Which, to be honest, wasn’t a complete surprise. The temperature hadn’t gone below 30°C.
Andy frowned as he looked into the tub. ‘Ah suppose it is a bit hotter here.’
As we drank ice-cream from our mugs, we told Linda and Andy where we were going and they invited us to visit them any time we were in Broome. We covered a lot of ground that night. It turned out that Andy was a quintessential Scottish man: an engineer who also happened to be a Reiki master. I told Nannette later I suspected that, in fine Scottish tradition, he had taught himself from a library book.
Oscar and Dylan were besotted with Linda. She was the first grown-up they had met for ages who was genuinely interested in everything they had to say. Andy threw in a few jokes to try to win them over to his side but it was too late. They were already calling Linda ‘Aunty’.
As I was kissing Dylan goodnight he said hopefully, ‘Mum, Linda could be related to us, couldn’t she?’ I agreed that it was possible. ‘Yes, because she’s a grown-up but she’s even shorter than Granny Nannette.’
When we drove into the cattle station that was going to be our home for the next six months, a thin woman in an apron walked onto the front porch of the homestead and flapped her hands at us crossly.
‘Didn’t you see the signs? The campground’s that way.’
We walked up the stairs, introduced ourselves to Diane and her husband, Glen, and explained that we were here to work. She frowned.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. My husband and I have been caretaking here over the wet. We run the campground. They didn’t say anything to us about it.’
‘We weren’t meant to be here until tomorrow, but we were definitely expected’, I said. ‘Could you call the owner?’
‘I suppose so’, said Diane. ‘I hope you’re not expecting to be fed. We’ve barely any supplies.’
‘No, we’re fine’, James said firmly when he saw that I could hardly speak. The deal had been a minimal wage in return for our meals and free accommoda
tion in the campground. We had brought some food with us, but not much. The nearest store was back at Imintji, three hours’ drive away. That night I was too distressed to make conversation with the other families in the campground. When the boys went to sleep I lay in bed and cried.
‘I can’t work it out’, I said to James. ‘I spoke to the owner a few weeks ago. She knew we were coming. I can’t believe I’ve dragged us all this way across the country for nothing. What are we going to do?’
The next few days were tense and uncomfortable for everyone. The owner was contacted and said that she had meant to get in touch and tell us that things had changed. Her daughter was unwell and the whole family were in Perth and unlikely to be at the property over the dry season. She thought the job would be too hard for us to manage on our own, especially as we had children to look after too.
‘You’re welcome to stay for a week. Until you find another job’, she offered.
James and the boys helped Glen slash the vegetation on the access tracks to the nearby gorges and swimming holes that drew in visitors. I called all the local properties to see if they had any work. Although it was still early in the tourist season, all of the local campgrounds and tourist operations already had their staff in place. Most were sympathetic and said if we hung around for a month or two something might come up.
Our luck changed when I rang the Imintji roadhouse and spoke to Jenny, the lady whose homemade cake we had bought the year before. She said that the Derby Bus Service was looking for a school bus driver to do the daily run from Imintji to Mount Barnett and her husband, Stan, added they might need help in the store when the season picked up. I rang the bus company and the manager said to come into Derby the next day for a chat.
A few hours later, James and Glen drove back up to the house with Oscar and Dylan riding behind them in the old ute. I couldn’t wait to tell them the news.
‘Looks like we’ll be on our way soon.’
‘I know’, said Diane, who had come out when she heard the ute approaching. ‘They’ll be gone tomorrow’, she told her husband.
It was my first experience of the Gibb River Road’s lightning-fast information exchange. It made Mission Beach look like it was on dial-up.
The bus company signed us up straight away. James’s job would be to drive the Imintji kids 80 kilometres north-east along the Gibb River Road to Wananami Remote Community School at Mount Barnett. We had camped at Mount Barnett the year before, pushing our day’s supplies across the Barnett River in polystyrene boxes and then walking to the waterfall at Manning Gorge. We had no idea then that, just across the road, was the Indigenous community of Kupungarri. Next we were interviewed by Jim, the CEO of the Aboriginal corporation that owned the Imintji roadhouse. Jim was a small, stout white man with a shiny bald head and a thick, carefully trimmed white beard.
‘He looks like one of the Seven Dwarves’, Oscar said with delight when we first met him. I bundled both boys outside to play before they could stuff this up.
We handed over our resumes and Jim added them to a teetering pile without even looking at them. We both officially had jobs at Imintji.
A few days later, we followed the bus on the morning run to school. The drive took an hour. The road dipped as it went through Saddlers Creek on the boundary of Imintji before turning slightly and stretching out across a huge expanse of sparse scrub. Although we had driven along this road before, everything seemed different now. Three slim boab trees leaned towards each other, their limbs entwined in an embrace. Haze from distant fires obscured the view when we reached the top of the Phillips Range. James followed the bus as the driver swerved from side to side, finding the smoothest section of the road, and I knew he was memorising every move.
The principal of the Wananami school, Gary, was a thin, pale man in his forties with jet-black hair and serious, intelligent eyes. He had spent almost his entire career teaching in remote Western Australian communities and met his wife in Halls Creek. Together they had worked in lots of schools, spending a few years in each and getting extraordinary results before moving on again. I got the impression they ran a very tight ship.
The school was divided into three classes: Kinder–Grade 3, Grades 4–6 and Secondary. I looked at Oscar and Dylan standing nervously in the playground while all the other kids played a vigorous session of kick-to-kick in bare feet. ‘They’ll be right’, said Gary. ‘They’re all pretty good kids here. And footy’s a great leveller.’
Driving back to Imintji, past the track to the cattle station where we had planned to spend the dry season, I was very thankful for the turn our lives had taken.
Chapter Sixteen
The Imintji store was a converted steel container on the Gibb River Road. Imintji itself was made up of 15 corrugated iron buildings that sat in the hard red dirt, fading in the sun. Five were homes to the three or four families who had chosen to live out bush rather than in Derby or Broome. Five young men shared another house. They were doing a TAFE program, learning skills while they did building and maintenance work around the community.
Most of the other buildings were empty and had become homes for dogs. Some of the houses – and the dogs – had been abandoned by people who had succumbed to the pull of town. Others were empty because broken plumbing and dangerous wiring had rendered them uninhabitable, even by local standards. The newly painted store and Stan and Jenny’s house were outside the main community. They sat inside a neat square of bright green grass that was edged with flowerbeds and fenced in tightly, like a child’s farm set. Our caravan huddled under a tree in the corner of the garden, as if it was trying to hide. Behind the shop was a kilometre of dusty scrub, spinifex and grey boulders and, beyond that, an escarpment reared up to the sky and stretched out along the back of the community like the wall of a massive dam.
A tour company that leased land from the Imintji community had set up a wilderness camp in the gully beside Saddlers Creek. It was aimed at more well-heeled tourists than us; the kind that boarded buses and toured the Gibb River Road, sleeping in safari tents and being fully catered for along the way. The tourist season had just begun and a helicopter company was offering joy rides over the nearby gorges and waterfalls. Business was still slow. During the day, the helicopter mostly sat on a cleared patch outside the shop. At night the pilot, Jim, parked it in a fenced area inside the community. The flight logs were carefully monitored, but Jim often took a passenger when he flew the 100 metres from the parking spot to the store and back again each day. On the first afternoon at Imintji, James and the boys climbed on board for a bird’s-eye view of our new home.
On our first official day of work and school, James and two very nervous boys left in the bus and I spent a full day in the shop with Stan and Jenny. I learned how to use the till; where to find the non-perishable stock that was stored in the dark shipping container behind the store; the importance of rotating the cartons of soft drink and potato chips to make sure they didn’t spend too long in the heat before being brought inside the air-conditioned store; where the cleaning products were kept; and how to count, balance and record the day’s takings.
Most importantly, Stan showed me the system for tracking how much diesel was pumped into the fuel tanks of the vehicles that pulled up out the front. The single pump was old and slow and a locked padlock secured the nozzle to the latch that released the fuel. When a vehicle pulled up, I grabbed my hat, the key and a greasy rag and went outside to greet them. Sometimes, especially if the driver was an older man, they were reluctant to let me handle the fuel pump; Stan would give them an encouraging smile and a wave from the shop’s window. When the tank was full, I tore a page from the diesel-stained notebook from my pocket and wrote down the amount for them to give to Stan. If the store was busy and I was fuelling up several vehicles in a row, I’d make a separate note of the numbers and hand it to Stan through the window so he could make sure it was all paid for.
When the school bus pulled up outside at the end of the day, Oscar and Dylan
jumped out with huge smiles and a new friend. Willie had a quad bike, and the three of them rode it around all afternoon, eating muffins that Jenny gave them. Dylan told me that he had a language class at school and had already learned a few words of the local Aboriginal language, Ngarinyin. Willie’s mother, Cherylene, came into the store and asked if the kids could come over the next day to play on the trampoline and try a traditionally cooked bush turkey.
We really had fallen on our feet. For a week or so, anyway.
Ten days later, I was alone in the store for the first time. Stan and Jenny were off on a flight with Jim. He was timing a new flight and had asked them to come along and point out the waterfalls and gorges that would be the selling points for the tourists. Jodie, who worked at the tourist camp, had also gone with them.
It had taken Jenny a lot of work to get Stan to agree to the flight. She had been very excited: this was a chance for them to leave the store for a couple of hours.
Stan was terrified of flying and Jodie had been jittery and on edge that morning too. James had driven back to Imintji to pump diesel for me, arriving just in time to join in the teasing as Stan and Jodie waited to climb aboard. Stan was clutching his camera to his chest and I guessed he would take photographs the whole time to settle his nerves.
The store had been quiet all morning and I’d been managing on my own but, when a bus full of tourists pulled up outside, I was relieved to hear the familiar thumping beat of the chopper returning. The bus blocked my view of the landing spot and all I could see was the bus door swing open and the first passenger venture into the bright sunshine. I rang the buzzer to let James know that I needed help with the fuel.