Best Australian Short Stories

by Douglas Stewart

  This Big Bill had neither hat nor tunic on; his shirt hung about him in so many bits of foul rag; his breeches were soaked through with blood—some of this had run out from his own wounds. His puttees, which had come loose, so that they were like to have tripped him up, he had cast aside. His hands, his clothes, were caked all over with blood and dust; and his forehead and two cheeks, where he had drawn his fist across them to wipe the sweat off, because of the blood upon it, were all blotched red. His eyes were hard and bright.

  At some distance off, the length of a long shot, there was a Turkish sniper; he lay, covered over by some low bushes, up on a little spur, across the lines, to the right. This sniper saw what hurt this Big Bill had dealt out to his comrades; he thought, then, it would be a thing well done to put an end to that business. So there he lay, this sniper, trying, shot after shot, to cut down this Big Bill, so that he must needs give over.

  When this sniper had been at work some time, he had so often just missed his bull that the Australian thought he would have no more of that. He let the bombs lie as then, picked up a rifle that lay alongside one of his dead mates, looked over it, and sighted it fair into those bushes. Then both rifles were let off; they rang out like one. The Australian then kept feeling about with his bullets in the sniper’s shelter, raking it over; and the Turk could get his shot in only when that other did. And thus they kept it up for a long time; for neither could make an end of his man.

  Now, if there is one thing more than another that an Australian will take no pleasure in, it is what?—to leave any matter, once put in hand, undone. And this Big Bill had but four shots left. So, when he had taken thought, he did this—he tied a strip of rag to his rifle, raised this up as straight as he might, waited till well-nigh a minute had gone past, and then fired the gun off at that angle. Then he stood up slowly, and put himself, open, before the Turk.

  The Turk, who had got tired as well, it may be, of that duel as they had up till then played it, knew very well what was afoot. He took aim, fired, and brought away his rival’s left ear.

  The Australian to that said: “Near enough! That was my good ear; but, if luck and my hand are in, I have sold it cheap.” Then the Turk, after ragging his rifle, and doing as Big Bill had done, stood up out of the bushes.

  The Australian took aim, fired, and hit his man—but not so cleanly as he had looked to. He put down his rifle, and said: “My father’s son, if the old chap but knew it, has made an end of his work this day. That shall be seen now.” Then he stood up again in front of that Turk.

  The Turk fired as before. He shot well, in spite of his wound; his bullet went so near doing its deed that it grazed that other’s right temple, tearing away the flesh about his eye upon that side.

  “Ah,” said Big Bill, “doesn’t God know what he’s up to? He might have made us men with but one eye only; and then must I have given over.” He shot well with his left eye.

  Then, when that Turk was again ready, the Australian once more took aim, and pulled from the left. His luck was still out though; his bullet, though it got home, did not kill.

  “That,” he said, “is not like me. Still, that eye was never so sure but it would sometimes go back on a fellow.”

  The Turk, spending more time upon it, now took his turn again; whether for his wounds, or because his blood shook in him, the shot went wide.

  At this Big Bill, who knew very well what he was about, twisted his bloody face into a grin. “There is now,” he said, “a dead man over there. My last bullet was always my best.” Then he took aim again.

  He did not fire though. Another Turk had got tired of waiting; and it was his shot that had the luck. Through the Australian’s head it went, clean. He fell down, kicking out a little with his legs, into the rough trench, and lay upon the stones at the bottom of it like nothing so much as a bundle of old rags. When they advanced, his mates left him there.

  As for that Turk, though they tried hard enough, no one could find out how he got on.

  Katherine Susannah Prichard

  THE COOBOO

  THEY had been mustering all day on the wide plains of Murndoo station. Over the red earth, black with ironstone pebbles, through mulga and curari-bush, across the ridges which make a blue wall along the horizon. The rosy, garish light of sunset was on plains, hills, moving cattle, men and horses.

  Through red dust the bullocks mooched, restless and scary still, a wild mob from the hills: John Gray, in the rear with Arra, the boy who was his shadow: Wongana, on the right with his gin, Rose: Frank, the half-caste, on the left with Minni.

  A steer breaking from the mob before Rose, she wheeled and went after him. Faint and wailing, a cry followed her, as though her horse had stepped on and crushed some small creature. But the steer was getting away. Arra went after him, stretched along his horse’s neck, rounded the beast and rode him back to the mob, sulky and blethering. The mob swayed. It had broken three times that day.

  John Gray called, “Yienda (you) damn fool, Rosey. Finish!” The gin, on her slight rough-haired horse, pulled up scowling. “Tell Meetchie, Thirty Mile, tomorrow,” John Gray said. “Miah, new moon.”

  Rose stewed her horse away from the mob of men and cattle. That wailing, thin and hard as hair-string, moved with her. “Minni!”

  John Gray jerked his head towards Rose. Minni’s bare heels struck her horse’s belly. With a turn of the wrist she swung her horse off from the mob, turned, leant forward, rising in her stirrups, and came up with Rose. But the glitter and tumult in Rose’s eyes, Minni looked away from them.

  Thin dark fiugures on their wiry station-bred horses, the gins rode into the haze of sunset towards the hills. The dull, dirty blue of the trousers wrapped round their legs was torn, their short fairish hair tousled by the wind.

  At a little distance, when men and cattle were a moving cloud of red dust, Rose’s anger gushed after them.

  “Koo!”

  Fierce as the cry of a hawk flew her last note of derision and defiance.

  A far-away rattle of the men’s laughter drifted back across the country.

  Alone, the gins would have been afraid, as darkness coming up behind was hovering near them, secreting itself among the low writhen trees and bushes: afraid of evil spirits who wander over the plains and stony ridges when the light of day is withdrawn. But together they were not so afraid. Twenty miles away over there, below that dent in the hills where Nyedee Creek made a sandy bed for itself among white-bodied gums, was Murndoo homestead and the uloo of their people.

  There was no track; and in the first darkness, thick as wool after the glow of sunset faded, only their instinct would keep them moving in the direction of the homestead and their own low, round huts of bagging, rusty tin, and dead boughs.

  Both were Wongana’s women: Rose, tall, gaunt and masterful; Minni, younger, fat and jolly. Rose had been a good stockman in her day: one of the best. Minni did not ride or track nearly as well as Rose.

  And yet, as they rode along, Minni pattered complacently of how well she had worked that day: of how she had flashed, this way and that, heading-off breakaways, dashing after them, turning them back to the mob so smartly that John had said: “Good man, Minni!” There was the white bullock—he had rushed near the yards. Had Rose seen the chestnut mare stumble in a crab-hole and send Arra flying? Minni had chased the white bullock, chased him for a couple of miles, and brought him back to the yards. No doubt there would be nammery for her and a new gina-gina when the men came in from the muster.

  She pulled a pipe from her belt, shook the ashes out, and with reins looped over one arm stuffed the bowl with tobacco from a tin tied to her belt. Stooping down, she struck a match on her stirrup-iron, guarded the flame to the pipe between her short white teeth, and smoked contentedly.

  The scowl on Rose’s face deepened, darkened. That thin, fretted wailing came from her breast.

  She unslung from her neck the rag rope by which the baby had been held against her body, and gave him a sagging breast t
o suck. Holding him with one arm, she rode slowly, her horse picking his way over the rough, stony earth.

  It had been a hard day. The gins were mustering with the men at sunrise. Camped at Nyedee Well the night before, in order to get a good start, they had been riding through the timbered ridges all the morning, rounding up wild cows, calves, and young bullocks, and driving them down to the yards at Nyedee, where John Gray cut out the fats, left old Jimmy and a couple of boys to brand calves, turn the cows and calves back to the ridge again while he took on the mob for trucking to Meekatharra. The bullocks were as wild as birds: needed watching all day. And all the time that small whimpering bundle against her breast had hampered Rose’s movements.

  There was nothing the gins liked better than a muster, riding after cattle. They were quicker in their movements, more alert than the men, sharper at picking up tracks, but they did not go mustering very often nowadays.

  Since John Gray had married, and there was a woman at Murndoo, she found plenty of washing, scrubbing, and sweeping for the gins to do: would not spare them often to go after cattle. But John was short-handed. He had said he must have Rose and Minni to muster Nyedee. And all day her baby’s crying had irritated Rose. The cooboo had wailed and wailed as she rode with him tied to her body.

  The cooboo was responsible for the wrong things she had done all day. Stupid things. Rose was furious. The men had yelled at her. Wongana, her man, blackguarding her before everybody, had called her “a hen who did not know where she laid her eggs”. And John Gray, with his “You damn fool, Rosey. Finish!” had sent her home like a naughty child.

  Now there was Minni jabbering of the tobacco she would get and the new gina-gina. How pleased Wongana would be with her! And the cooboo, wailing, wailing. He wailed as he chewed Rose’s empty breast, squirming against her: wailed and gnawed.

  She cried out with hurt and impatience. Rage, irritated to madness, rushed like waters coming down the dry creek-beds after heavy rain. Rose wrenched the cooboo from her breast and flung him from her to the ground. There was a crack as of twigs breaking.

  Minni glanced aside. “Wiah!” she gasped, with widening eyes. But Rose rode on, gazing ahead over the rosy, garish plains and the wall of the hills, darkening from blue to purple and indigo.

  When the women came into the station kitchen, earth, hills, and trees were dark: the sky heavy with stars. Minni gave John’s wife his message: that he would be home with the new moon, in about a fortnight.

  Meetchie, as the blacks called Mrs John Gray, could not make out why the gins were so stiff and quiet; why Rose stalked, scowling and sulky-fellow, sombre eyes just meeting hers, and moving away again. Meetchie wanted to ask about the muster: what sort of condition the bullocks had been in; how many were on the road; if many calves had been branded at Nyedee. But she knew the women too well to ask questions when they looked like that.

  Only when she had given them bread and a tin of jam, cut off hunks of corned beef for them, filled, their billies with strong black tea, put sugar in their empty tins, and the gins were going off to the uloo, she realized that Rose was not carrying her baby as usual.

  “Why, Rose,” she exclaimed, “where’s the cooboo?”

  Rose walked off into the night. Minni glanced back with scared eyes and followed Rose.

  In the dawn, when a cry, remote and anguished, flew through the clear air, Meetchie wondered who was dead in the camp by the creek. She remembered how Rose had looked the night before when she asked about the cooboo.

  Now, she knew the cooboo had died; Rose was wailing for him in the dawn, cutting herself with stones until her body bled, and screaming in the fury of her grief.

  Les Robinson

  THE VINE-DWELLER

  FROM the Investigator of Occurrences and Conduct Peculiar or Unusual, Dept X, to the Inspector of Nuisances, Tanglehurst:

  Dear Sir,

  I enclose herewith copy of report from an observer in an aero plane, on a reconnaissance flight over your terrain, received by me yesterday:

  “While flying in a northerly direction over Tanglehurst on the 18th inst., at an altitude of 1000 feet, the visibility being excellent, we sighted at eleven a.m. Eastern Standard Time what appeared to be a raft floating in a sea of greenery. As washing was hanging on the rigging we concluded that the raft had an occupant. The absence of distress signals indicated, we assumed, that all was well on board.”

  Please forward explanation of this extraordinary discovery at your earliest convenience.

  While walking the other morning along a path deep down on the bottom, as it were, of the sea of greenery, I met the owner and occupant of the “raft”. He crawled ashore, as perhaps it would be permissible to say, through a tunnel under the expanse of green. Wearing boots and what resembled overalls of the same colour, he looked more like a large grasshopper than anything else.

  We are neighbours,” he said “I have been observing you for some little time. I often see you when you don’t see me. In fact you have never, in all probability, seen me before.”

  “Oh yes I have,” I replied. “But only once. I caught sight of you whilst up a tree breaking some dead branches off for fire-wood. You were sitting on what appeared to be a spring-mattress, double-bed size, resting on top of all that tangle and riot of creepers. If I were not mistaken you were mending a pair of trousers.”

  “There must at the time have been a very high tide then,” he growled sourly, “for, as the Inspector of Nuisances who has been round here day after day again lately, peering in every direction through field-glasses, has, I should think, discovered, I’m very hard to find.”

  “A very high tide?” I said, in wonderment.

  “Yes,” he said. “This sea of greenery rises at times, and at others falls. The moon even when in perigee has nothing at all to do with it; the weather, though, everything. After rain always it rises. Heat, especially if prolonged and unrelieved, causes it to sag, so much so that every now and then I find myself nearing the ground.”

  “What put the idea into your head, in the first place, if you wouldn’t mind me asking? Was it the housing shortage?”

  “Well, no,” said the vine-dweller, “it wasn’t. When I first came here to live—I don’t own the allotment, thank goodness—I began the way most people begin when they occupy a block or tract of ground covered thickly, as this one is, with a tangle of undergrowth both riotous and exuberant: I started with a brushhook and a sickle to slash and hack it down—my idea, which I must admit was most ordinary and mundane, being to plant vegetables when all the wild verdure had been slain. Yes, I was utterly ruthless. I attacked it with fury, slaughtered it as though it were poisonous or had endeavoured to injure me. But I had not been doing so long, I’m pleased to say, before I began to question the rectitude of such savagery. Was it patriotic? I asked myself, for, after all, these creepers are indigenous and have been here for generations, which surely gives them more right to occupy and even to monopolize the soil than the French, Lima, and Madagascar beans, the Brussels sprouts, the Jerusalem artichokes, the Lebanon lettuces, the Swede tumips—and other vegetables with an origin that is alien®I had thought of planting. Even weeds, many of them— Scotch thistles for instance, buttercups, clover, hawthorne, gorse and blackberry, just to mention a few—having found their way into this country from other lands, are far less entitled to right of occupancy than the intertwined, ever-thickening festoons and masses of sub-tropical vegetation I was intent upon destroying. So I desisted,” he said, “which, as I cannot claim to be by any means energetic, really, could scarcely be regarded as a deprivation.

  “How, then, without exterminating any more of these robust and splendid vines,” he continued, “was I to erect a habitation of some kind? Why erect one at all? Why incur the fatigue? Why not, I asked myself after cogitation, let the creepers sustain you? They’re thick and strong enough. Live then in suspension among them; float in perpetuity on this deep, green heaveless sea.

  “But to derive the greatest b
enefit from the project and, at the same time minimize the possibility of interference, it would be most necessary, I realized—as, of course, the other inhabitants of all such wildernesses do—to merge to the uttermost into one’s environment, to match it or harmonize so closely with it that, save to the practised eye, one would be invisible.

  It can of course, be done quite easily,” he added. All that one needs is a pot of paint of the colour of one’s surroundings, and clothing of the selfsame hue.”

  “By the way,” I said, “is your floating home, as I surmised, a spring-mattress, double-bed size?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I could think of nothing more suitable. It has, in fact, satisfied me so completely that I have sent the maker, whose name is on it, a testimonial in which I stated that it is unequalled for the purpose.

  “The tarpaulin I use in wet weather,” he went on, “is, I need scarcely mention, painted the same shade of green as the mattress. My overalls, boots, hat, and socks, as no doubt you have noticed, are of locust colour too.”

  “What about insects?” I asked. “Aren’t they a nuisance to you?” “No,” he said, “they don’t trouble me in the least. I have tamed several that are formidable, you see. They never leave me, are very watchful, and hurl all other insects that reach the mattress—either out of idle curiosity or with the intention of molesting me—off it at once. If they don’t like these intruders much they maim or kill them as a rule before doing so,” he added.

  “But what do you live on ?” I asked.