The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  And more than anything else it was a world of noises. The roar of wind as it swept over the hills and set the trees thrumming. The piping of birds, crystal in the high air. The bubble of streams, and the distant rush of water plunging into chasms. The thumps of wallabies as they leapt through the undergrowth, and the scrabble of bush turkeys, clustering around camp sites. And echoes. There had been no echoes out on the plains. But the mountains rang with them, and sounds seemed to travel fantastic distances. The forests reverberated with distant axes at work, the steady clock of steel striking wood or the hungry rasp of saws. Bullocks snuffed and groaned as they laboured in hidden gullies, their drivers’ shouts rising, punctuated by cracks of whips. Trucks whined on the lower mountain tracks. And every once in a while there would come the deep, rumbling rush and crackle that signified the felling of yet another tree, and for a moment the entire range would stand still, hushed, as the echoes rolled back and forth. John would never find another place where sound would seem so three dimensional, so crisp, and so suggestive.

  It was a world of secrets, too. On the plains, everything could be seen and only the very curve of the earth could hide you. In the mountains, the land turned in on itself, concealing, and yet revealing something new with almost every step. New vistas, new perspectives. Dark gullies where the sun never shone. Sheer cliffs that dropped away without warning right beneath your feet. Granite boulders that lay piled in creek beds as if torrents had once gushed there. Caves that had been scooped out of bluffs by the wind and rain. Giant strangler fig trees that had trunks hollowed out like spreading tents. Dead tree stumps full of water, alive with swimming creatures. Bizarrely shaped fungi, feeding off the rotting limbs of fallen trees. Spreading fogs that blanketed the hills for days, and sent creeping tendrils under the forest canopy. The strange warmth of the rain forest even in deepest winter. The sheer amazement of snow on the exposed peaks, as alien and impossible as it was fleeting, melting within hours.

  The beauty of it all washed cold and cleansing through John, but it was the deeper mysteries of the mountains that called most strongly to him,and awakened some dormant part of his soul. There were the balds, for one thing, here and there on the hilltops, soft grassy pates, often littered with granite boulders and stones. They offered the only unobstructed views of the plains far below, and later, lookouts would be built there for tourists, but for the first wanderers in the mountains, they were strange, windswept, inexplicable places. Were they made by Aborigines in some earlier time? The old timers said they weren’t,but John,circling the clearings and probing the soil with his feet, was not so sure. Maybe they weren’t man-made, but something about them spoke to man all the same.

  Then there were the bunya pines. They were tall, straight trees that opened to a conical dome, often rising far above the rest of the forest canopy. For the loggers they promised many thousands of feet of timber, but for the Aborigines, in earlier times, they had promised food, because they bore large, smooth cones that made a superlative meal. These ‘nuts’ ripened every three years, when Aboriginal tribes from far and wide would converge on the mountains to gorge themselves in a great festival. The loggers did the same, roasting the cones and feasting on the almost over-rich, buttery kernels. And whenever they came across one of the old leviathan pines, they would see, running up its trunk to where the cones grew, a ladder of footholds, seemingly cut out by a stone axe, perhaps as much as two centuries earlier. All across the mountains there was no other clear sign that people had been there before white men — no dwellings or middens or cave drawings. There were only these notches hewn in the tree trunks, slowly disappearing.

  It wasn’t that John cared about the Aborigines themselves. They were gone and wouldn’t be coming back. But he walked the hills and pondered all he saw, the bunya pines, and the grassy hilltops, and it seemed to him that there was something about these places that those earliest inhabitants must surely have recognised in their turn. Maybe they had not made the clearings; but sensing the atmosphere of those places, had they positioned the stones? Likewise, there were caves, and certain rock outcrops and waterfalls that spoke to John of a long human presence. Of being important to that human presence. He could not define it, but it was there. He talked with men who had lived all their lives in the Hoops. They claimed to remember the last tribes who had roamed the hills, and even to have seen the last of the bunya nut festivals. But according to these old men, the blacks had never lived in the mountains — supposedly they’d believed the upper hills to be haunted by spirits. So they had climbed the range solely in the daytime, to harvest the pine cones, and then had withdrawn to the lower slopes to hold their festivals by night.

  John heard the same history wherever he asked, but it left him dissatisfied. The truth was, up until this time, he had regarded land purely as an inanimate thing. As a boy, riding the plains with his father, he had seen all that sweeping expanse of grass and thought almost exclusively in terms of sheep and weights of wool. He had come to mountains in the same frame of mind — he was a timber-cutter, and the Hoops were a source of trees, nothing else. But the more time John spent in the hills, the more he seemed to perceive the land around him as something powerful in its own right — to hear a voice in it, meant specifically for human ears. And yet the sensation would slip away again, just as soon as he thought he had grasped it. He wondered, eventually, if this was because, even after several years, he was still a stranger to the mountains. He had not grown up there, nor had anyone in his family. Maybe it took a lifetime to get a piece of country into your bones; and maybe other lifetimes as well, your father’s and grandfather’s.

  Nevertheless, John was happier in the mountains than he had ever been. And yet, both he and Dudley were acutely aware that the logging industry in the Hoops was winding down. Its heyday had been two generations earlier. The remains of that busier time were everywhere, huts and mills and chutes, all sinking into ruin. Now there was perhaps a decade or two of logging left, increasingly limited in scale. The future lay in the cattle that grazed the lower slopes. John and Dudley discussed these things at night, waiting for sleep, when a velvet blackness enfolded the rain forest, and moths and other insects swarmed around their campfires. Perhaps, when they’d saved up enough, they could buy a property in the foothills. Beef cattle, or maybe dairy. And one day, not too far ahead surely, when the roads were better, tourists would be flocking to the national park. There would be other opportunities then. Guest houses. Camping grounds. Guided walks. And who knew the mountains better than they did themselves?

  They were fine nights of talking and dreams. Strangely, John seldom thought about Kuran Station any more. Occasionally, he would find himself on some high point, gazing westwards at the wide world of the plains. Where once there would have been an unbroken sea of tall, swaying grass, John now saw a patchwork of cultivation and roads. Even as he watched he knew invisibly small men and horses and tractors were at work down there, and the last remnants of virgin pasture were disappearing under the plough. He was surprised at how little he cared. He would look northwards then, to the long spur that ran out into the plains, and he would remember Kuran House, and the hills he had explored in his childhood; and he would remember too the vow he had made to regain it all one day. But had that vow actually meant anything? After all, could a grown man remain bound forever by his youth? Then he would breathe in the fresh forest air, and think of a future where he stayed in the mountains for the rest of his days, building his own life, not seeking vainly for one that was gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘DON’T FALL IN,’THE OLD MAN WARNED.

  William was clambering along the rocky shelf above the water hole. Small flakes of stone disturbed by his progress slipped over the edge and dropped into the pool with low plunks. The tone of the warning was serious, and William glanced back over his shoulder. His uncle had seated himself on the bench beneath the willow tree, the sandwiches unopened at his side ‘It’s deep. And cold in winter. Too cold for swimming.�
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  ‘How deep?’

  ‘No one knows. Maybe it’s bottomless.’

  William’s eyes narrowed. ‘Really?’

  ‘I used to swim here as a boy. And I never touched the bottom. Oh, most of it is shallow enough. But the deepest part is right under the waterfall, and when you dive down there it’s very dark and very cold. There’s an overhang and a sort of cave that goes back and downwards. Deep down, into a hole. But it’s freezing in there and your lungs shrivel up…’

  William stared down. Most of the pool reflected the sky, but under the overhanging shelf a blackness waited.

  ‘There’s always water here,’ his uncle continued. ‘No matter whether it rains or not. In a long drought the creek will stop flowing and most of the pool will drain away, but it never goes completely dry. There’s a spring, down in the cave. The water oozes up from the rocks. I suppose it comes from under the mountains somewhere. Maybe that’s why it’s so cold.’

  William left off his exploring, came back along the shelf.‘Isn’t this what those men were looking for?’ he asked.

  His uncle gave a measured nod.

  ‘But why didn’t you tell them?’

  ‘What do you think would happen if I did?’

  William shrugged.‘They’d come and look at it.’

  ‘Yes. But they wouldn’t be the last. And that’s the thing. Right now, apart from you and me, hardly anyone knows about this place. Of course in the old days the station staff used to come up here for picnics. That’s when this bench was put in. But that was long ago, and those people are dead and gone. It’s a secret now, this place.’

  William gazed over the water hole. A secret.

  The old man began to unwrap the sandwiches.‘It’s better that way. Places like this need to be protected. I don’t even let the cattle into this part of the property. But if I told those men this was here, that student fellow would write about it. Then lots of people would know. They’d want to come and look. Others would want to come in the summer to swim. Some of them wouldn’t even bother to ask, they’d just sneak onto the property.’

  William tried to remember what the two men had said. Wasn’t there an important reason they wanted to find the water hole?

  ‘It could get even worse,’ his uncle said. ‘The shire council or the government or someone else might try and take the water hole away from us. That student might say it’s too important to leave in private hands. That’s the problem with people like him. They stick their noses into everyone’s business. Maybe the council would want to add this bit of land to the national park. Then there’d be picnic tables and rubbish everywhere.’

  William was staring at the pool. It was so still, and with the high banks and the overlooking trees, it looked so hidden that it might never have been visited before.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ he said.

  ‘Not even your mother?’

  William hadn’t thought of that. ‘I can’t tell her?’

  ‘We’ll see. Maybe we’ll bring her up here one day. But until then, it might be better to keep quiet. Things like this…it’s a man’s business.’

  William selected a sandwich and both of them ate in silence for a time.

  His uncle spoke finally. ‘You know, this water hole — it’s the source of the biggest river in Australia.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well, in a way. You take the creek. It starts behind us, up in the mountains. But it doesn’t always flow. This is the first permanent water source, right here, so this is really the beginning.’ He nodded towards the far end of the pool, where the water eased over the lip in the rock and wound away. ‘From here the creek flows along the spur, and then out west across the plains. Eventually it joins up with the Condamine River. You’ve seen the Condamine, haven’t you?’

  William nodded dubiously. It was only a shallow, sandy watercourse, the Condamine. Surely that wasn’t the biggest river in the country.

  His uncle smiled.‘I know. The Condamine isn’t so big. But it flows down into New South Wales and eventually it becomes one of the headwaters of the Darling River. Now the Darling is something. It’s narrow and muddy, but it’s very long. It flows all the way through western New South Wales. Hundreds of miles. Through desert, for a lot of it. Darling River, Darling Downs — they’re named after the same person, of course.’

  The old man mused for a moment, chewing on another bite from his sandwich.

  ‘There used to be steamboats on the Darling, when there was enough water. You could travel by boat from the ocean right up into the middle of Australia. That’s how they used to get the wool out from the big stations, before trains and trucks came along. Sometimes the Darling would flood and spread out across the plains, fifteen or twenty miles wide. Those little steamboats would get lost and then, when the floods passed, they’d find themselves stuck in the bush, ten miles from the river.’

  He wiped crumbs from his mouth.

  ‘Anyway, the Darling flows into the Murray, way down south, on the border with Victoria. The Murray, well, it’s already big. It starts up in the Snowy Mountains. In fact, between them, the Murray and the Darling drain just about the whole of inland eastern Australia. And after they join up they run on together westwards, all the way into South Australia. This is thousands of miles away by now. Until finally the river reaches the sea. Way down near Adelaide. The other end of the country. Of course, the Murray is nothing like the Amazon or the Mississippi or the Nile. Those rivers are even longer, and have ten times the water in them. A hundred times. But that’s Australia for you. It’s big … but it’s thin too. Million and millions of acres of land, but most of the soil is just dust, there’s not enough rain, the rivers haven’t got any water, and the mountains are so old they’ve worn away to nothing.’

  The old man stretched a hand out over the water hole.

  ‘Okay, maybe this isn’t the real source of the Condamine. That’s down near Warwick. But the Condamine flows up here in a big loop before it heads south, and this creek is the northernmost tributary on that loop. So you and me, we’re sitting right at the very top of the entire Murray–Darling system. Those rivers, they keep Australia alive. All that vitality and wealth — the wellspring for it is right here, in this little pool.’

  William was gazing along the creek bed, a rutted channel amidst the trees. He tried to picture it winding away to meet great rivers and deserts and snowcapped mountains and southern oceans, but imagination failed him.

  ‘That’s the sort of thing you have to know about a piece of land, Will, if you’re going to own it. You have to know where it fits in. You don’t just buy a few square miles and put up a fence and say, This is it. Every stretch of earth has its story. You have to listen, and understand how it connects with other stories. Stories that involve the whole country in the end.’

  William looked up and found the old man’s eyes on his.

  ‘I asked you before what stories you could tell me about your old farm. Wasn’t there anything you learnt from your father?’

  From his father? William thought of laughter over the dinner table, or the two of them tinkering about in the shed, or walking through the wheat, looking for wild oats and turnips and other weeds. But his uncle wanted something big and broad, and William’s father had never told him anything like that. There hadn’t been enough time, before he was gone.

  ‘It’s not you I blame,’ his uncle said. ‘Your father was the problem.’

  William lowered his head, felt resentment stir within him, like a cloud passing above.

  ‘Do you know exactly how you and I are related?’ the old man asked.

  ‘I know you’re not really my uncle.’

  ‘Right. I’m your great-uncle. I had a little sister, you see. She grew up in Powell and got married and had a son — your father. I only met him once, at my sister’s funeral. He was a mail clerk for the town council then, and had just married your mother. Didn’t have two cents to rub together, poor fool. I’d no idea he wanted to be
a farmer. But then who he was, what he did, that was no concern of mine.’ The old man’s indifference was chilling. ‘I’m sure he was a good enough person. But the fact is, he had no feeling for the country. He certainly didn’t know much about growing wheat. If he had talked to me first, I would have told him never to buy that property.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That land was never any good, that’s why. It’s a bad patch. There’s a few of them out there. Back when it was all sheep country, you saw pretty quick that although the plains look like they’re dead flat, that isn’t the case at all. When it floods, for instance, the water doesn’t just sit there. It flows, east to west. And it’s not just one big flat sheet of water. It flows in channels — some bits of land stay dry, others go a foot under water. The smart farmers, they get their land professionally surveyed and then arrange their paddocks into contour banks. Your father didn’t do that, neither did anyone who owned the place before him. So that farm had lost a lot of its best soil to erosion. But that wasn’t the big problem. The big problem was that there wasn’t much good soil there in the first place.’

  William looked up, disbelieving. Not much soil? That was ridiculous.

  His uncle held up a hand. ‘I know: how can you run out of soil when it’s sixty feet deep? But it’s not the same everywhere. There are shallower, sandy places. I don’t know where they came from, but when it was all pasture you could see the bad patches plain as day. Big yellow stretches that died off first in the summer. The sheep wouldn’t go there. And no farmer should have either.’

  ‘Our farm was one those places?’