The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  Luck cast them all together in early 1938. One mid-summer afternoon,John and Dudley were on their way into Powell, bearded and ragged after a long stint up in the mountains. As they tramped along the road, greenish-grey thunderheads were building in the west. The two friends watched the storm’s approach in weary resignation, but as the first warning breezes stirred the dust, they spied the Fisher house ahead of them. They would not normally have thought to intrude, but now they sprinted the last few hundred yards. By the time they knocked on the front door, the wind was rising, the sky was black and the first drops of water were smacking the ground. Oliver, recognising them as two of his own, welcomed them in. From the back verandah they watched as rain and hail hammered down, and the surrounding paddocks turned into white lakes. The Powell road, still mostly unsealed, would be an impassable quagmire until the next day at least. Oliver, in a fit of generosity, declared that his two loggers should stay for dinner, and then the night.

  The men washed and shaved and emerged transformed, drying off in the kitchen while the Fishers’ elderly cook prepared the meal. Edging awkwardly into the dining room, they found Harriet and her younger brother waiting. Matthew was fifteen, a solid, youthful version of his father; John and Dudley had already caught sight of him about the sawmill. But Harriet, just turned nineteen, and matron of her father’s house, was an entirely pleasant surprise. Indeed, it had been so long since John and Dudley had sat in a well-appointed dining room, with fine china and crystal glasses on the table, that the evening seemed almost magical. Oliver was a genial host, the wine settled deliciously in his guests’ veins, and, more than anything else, there was the pleasure of female company. Harriet was nothing like her brick of a father. She had been born into wealth, polished at respectable schools, and had inherited a slender shape and natural style from her dead mother. Yet for all her education and grace, there was nothing aloof about Harriet — she was perfectly at ease entertaining two of her father’s workers for an evening. Her conversation was bright and bantering,and even John, with his innate reserve, found himself caught up in the good cheer.

  So the party carried on far into the night. When it finally broke up, Oliver, actually quite drunk, announced that the two men must feel free to visit the house whenever they might happen to be passing. Thus the courtship of Harriet began. Of course, neither John nor Dudley, in those early days, considered himself a serious proposition for Harriet. Nor did Oliver Fisher. He liked the two men well enough, but he also knew how little they earned (who knew better?) and two timber-getters of slim means, without a home to call their own, were hardly the most eligible of suitors for his daughter. Still, he made no serious objection to their visits, not even when they started escorting Harriet to the occasional movie, or to picnics, or to the local dances. He even let John and Dudley borrow his car to drive Harriet around. Perhaps he looked on the two men as older brothers to his daughter, a rough and ready influence, but a benign one. It would have been a different story if either man had tried to date her alone, but as it was, there was always the one to chaperone the other.

  To John, Dudley and Harriet, however, it gradually became clear that they were more than just big brothers and sister. For the two loggers, time away from the mountains became increasingly focused around the Fisher house, while for Harriet, the days spent with her boys from the hills became the most precious of her engagements. Did they seem more vital and alive than anyone else she knew? They had nothing in the world but themselves, but did that make them freer, more fiercely individual? Whatever moved her, she played no favourite between them. Dudley was the laughing one, the better talker, and the better dancer. Harriet responded in kind, but there was more to her than conviviality. Perhaps the early death of her mother had matured her, for there was a side to her that appreciated the gravity in John, and which shared, in part, his wariness of the world.

  After a year it became accepted between the three of them that Harriet would choose one or the other eventually. Her father remained blissfully unaware of this development, but she no longer even pretended to be interested in other men. It was with Harriet in mind, then, that John and Dudley began to seriously assess their futures. They had saved alarmingly little from their time in the mountains. In truth, the work was intermittent. There were often long periods when there was no demand for timber, and the gangs had to wait idly in their camps until new orders came in, surviving as best they could. It might be years before either of them would have any real financial security. They arrived at an agreement, therefore, that neither would press his suit until happier and richer days. It seemed that Harriet tacitly acquiesced. And maybe it was better that way, for it delayed a painful choice.

  Not that John had any doubts about whom Harriet preferred. Admittedly, he was rarely alone with her, but he was convinced that in those moments he could detect an emotion from Harriet that was meant uniquely for him. It was as simple as an intensity in her eyes as she probed at his long silences. Dudley, all on the surface, she seemed to understand effortlessly, but John could see that in comparison he himself remained a mystery. She was intrigued — and that was a heady thing to sense from a woman. Especially one so smooth and elegant, and now amazingly within his reach. But what would happen when she actually made her choice known — how Dudley would react when he lost — that was something John couldn’t bring himself to contemplate.

  Fate took it all out of their hands, in the shape of a falling tree.

  It was the spring of 1939, and John, Dudley and the rest of their gang were at work high in the mountains. They were sawing through the trunk of a hoop pine, deep within a rain forest gully. John was standing by, well out of the line of fall, but when the tree began to topple, its upper limbs became caught in the canopy, and the trunk revolved perversely on its own base. Men scattered as the tree lurched this way and that, but when the whole thing came down, it was John who failed to get clear. He received a glancing blow to his left leg. It shattered his knee and snapped his shin in a compound fracture.

  His work mates quickly rigged up a stretcher and got him down the mountain, from where, via an agonising ride on a sawmill truck, they took him to the hospital in Powell. Infection set in, and for a week John hung in a delirium of pain, fever and repeated surgery. When his head finally cleared, a doctor told him that they’d managed to save the leg, though he didn’t think it would ever be much use again. On the brighter side, the doctor added, at least John didn’t have to worry about joining the army now. The army? John didn’t know what the man was talking about. Oh, the doctor replied, hadn’t John heard? Australia was at war with Germany, and had been for four days.

  When Dudley came to visit he was full of the news. John listened without much interest. He was in pain, and Europe was a long way away. So it was a complete shock when Dudley announced that he planned to enlist as soon as possible. He talked on about duty and the old country and the evils of Nazism, and went so far as to offer sympathy because John would be unable to join up too. But even through his disbelief John knew full well that, leg or no leg, he would never have enlisted anyway. His experiences at Kuran Station still bit deep. True, the Whites were no more English than John himself, but he had glimpsed the mother country behind their prejudices and arrogance. They stood for the Empire, the Whites, and they had rejected him. So the Empire’s wars were no business of his.

  They weren’t Dudley’s business either, and John told him so. How could he throw everything away just for the sake of rallying around the Union Jack? If Australia insisted on sending an army to Europe, well, there were hundreds of thousands of unemployed men who would welcome the food and the pay. They didn’t need Dudley. Oliver Fisher agreed. The sawmill owner could see lucrative military contracts in the offing — it was no time to be losing his timber men. Why be rash, he told Dudley, why run off to war? Nothing was actually happening in Europe yet anyway. When Harriet echoed her father, Dudley relented. He turned his back on the recruiting stations and returned to the mountains.


  Relieved, John began the long, painful process of learning to walk again. At the end of several months, the best he could do was shuffle along with the aid of a stick. The stick, hopefully, could be disposed of one day, but he would always limp, and when he was tired the knee was liable to give way entirely. Oliver gave him some part-time duties around the sawmill, but John was forced to acknowledge that he would never cut timber again. And things weren’t really settled with Dudley. John and Harriet were aware of a restlessness in their friend as he pored over newspaper reports and listened to the radio. His ears were pricked for the sound of faraway gunfire.

  When Germany finally invaded France, there was no holding Dudley back a second time. They resolved to send him off as best they could. Even as the evacuation of Dunkirk was being carried out on the other side of the world, Dudley’s enlistment party was held at the Fisher house. John spent the night full of a cold foreboding. The war was assuming an ominous tone. It was obviously going to be long and bloody and world-altering, and however deluded Dudley might be, he was going to fight for his country and John wasn’t. It would change things between the two of them forever. He’d seen it amongst older men who had lived through the Great War — the unbridgeable gulf between those who went and those who stayed. Whatever their individual stories, those left behind had ever after been judged the lesser men. And it would be the same this time around.

  At the end of the night, John and Dudley and Harriet sat out on the back verandah. They knew it was the end of something. They were caught up in a bigger history now, vulnerable to its currents.We’ll all come back here, Harriet insisted as they sat there, the night cool and dark about them. She clutched their hands, looking back and forth. When it’s all over, we’ll meet up right here, and everything will be the same. Her eyes searched into each of her two men, affirming and questioning at the same time. John and Dudley exchanged glances over her head, understanding fully what she meant. And afterwards, when Harriet had retired, it did not need to be spoken again. Everything was to be held in abeyance until after the war was over. It was the only thing to be done. They shook hands, more than six years of friendship and trust behind them, and then withdrew, each to his sleepless bed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT WAS TWO WEEKS BEFORE WILLIAM’S UNCLE RETURNED, AND when he did, he immediately set to work in his office and spoke to no one for three days. William hovered hopefully outside the door. He could hear the clatter of the typewriter, and again, the rhythmic thump of the other machine. It was all very frustrating, and it wasn’t until the fourth day that he was invited inside. He found his uncle ensconced behind the desk, still poking away at the typewriter. He looked tired, his face hollow above the collar of a faded woollen jumper. Stubble pricked his cheeks, and under the desk William could see a pair of bony feet jammed into slippers. But the old man’s eyes were alert, and his fingers stabbed down vehemently on the keys. Coffee-cups and dinner plates littered the desk, and papers were scattered everywhere, some printed, some handwritten, some crumpled up into contemptuous balls.

  ‘Take a seat,’ his uncle said, typing on.

  William selected a chair near the desk and waited. His glance fell on one of the tables, where a hulked shape had been unveiled from beneath its dust sheet. He realised that it was an old printing machine. A crank handle stuck out from its side, and William knew exactly the sort of noise it would make — he had heard it clanking away for the past three days. The smell of ink was in the air, and beside the contraption sat several thick piles of paper, freshly printed in smudgy purple lines.

  The old man hit an emphatic full stop, then dug around in a drawer. He retrieved a sheet of paper, and slid it across the desk.

  ‘Have a look at that.’

  It was a small poster, and it showed a flag, slightly furled as if blowing in a wind. The flag was blue, and bore a white cross with a star at the tip of each arm and a star in the centre.

  ‘You recognise it?’

  William shook his head.

  ‘You should. That flag has been flying on the flagpole out front ever since you got here.’

  William had never seen the flag outside do anything but hang limp against its pole. He studied the poster again. There were bold capitals above the picture — THE AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENCE LEAGUE. His uncle held out a hand.

  ‘Are you telling me you’ve really never seen that flag before?’

  William gave the poster back.‘No.’

  ‘Not even at school? You’ve never heard of the Eureka Stockade?’

  William lowered his eyes. Was this another of the old man’s tests? William had resolved to be as adult as he could, but what was he to do when there were just things he didn’t know?

  ‘Good Lord,’ the old man mused. Then he straightened in his chair. ‘Eureka was one of the first movements for independence in this country. There was a group of gold miners, during the gold rush down in Victoria, in the 1850s, when Australia was still a colony ruled by England. The miners were digging away and trying to scratch out a living, and suddenly the colonial government came along and inflicted huge licence fees on them. Fees that would ruin most of the miners. It wasn’t just the money, there were other issues too, but basically people were sick of being at the beck and call of the lords and ladies back in England. What right did England have to charge fees over Australian soil? So the miners revolted. They threw up barricades and flew the Southern Cross flag and declared their own republic. There were hundreds of them, and the whole state of Victoria went into a panic. These were volatile times. Australia was a brand new place, and when rebels talked about republics a lot of people got excited. The colonial government didn’t muck around. They mustered all the troops they could and sent them in. It was a full-scale battle, and the miners lost. But they won too, because nothing was the same after that.’

  His uncle picked up the poster again, turning it towards William.

  ‘This is their flag. You could argue that it’s the first truly Australian flag, not like that monstrosity with the Union Jack. But these days the Eureka flag gets used for any old thing. People fly it to sell used cars and hamburgers, or stick it on margarine labels. They think it just means something patriotic. Other people use it as a protest flag. Even the Australian Communist Party waves it around sometimes — as if the miners were socialists, for Christ’s sake, and Peter Lalor was our answer to Karl Marx.’ He dropped the poster on the desk.‘But I use it because of what this flag really stands for. Independence. That’s the key word. You know what it means, don’t you?’

  ‘I think so,’ said William.

  The old man laughed.‘Then you’re a rarity,Will, because not many people do.’

  William blinked in bafflement. His uncle sobered and returned his attention to the sheet of paper in the typewriter. William noticed now that the sheet was a waxy stencil, and that the letters were actually holes, punched through by the typewriter keys. Satisfied with what he read, the old man pulled out the page and stood up.‘So what did you do while I was away?’

  It sounded a casual question, but William knew otherwise. This was what he’d been waiting for. ‘I looked around,’ he answered, very serious. ‘A lot.’

  ‘Ah.’ His uncle was smiling.‘The old place doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?’

  William shook his head gravely.

  ‘Good. Maybe you’ll understand what’s at stake then.’ He moved over to the printing machine and began fixing the stencil to an ink-stained drum on top of the device.‘This property — it’s mine, isn’t it? I own it. If I don’t want anyone knowing about that water hole, for instance, then that’s my business. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well, there are things happening in this country that will take that choice away, if people like me don’t put a stop to it.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Government things. Same as always.’ He inserted a sheaf of blank paper into a tray at the rear of the machine, then stood back. ‘You see these old paintings?�
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  He was pointing at the smoky images upon the walls — the fox hunt on one hand, and on the other, men riding amidst sheep as the golden plains rolled beyond.

  ‘They were done in the 1860s, when the House was built. The Whites spared no expense in getting the artist. They wanted the finest of everything. But don’t go thinking Kuran Station was always like that. Go back to the 1840s, when white men first came here. This was a wilderness, far beyond the colonial frontier. There was no civilisation, no law and order — that was all a thousand miles behind, back in Sydney. So those first men were completely alone, a law unto themselves. Something like that is unimaginable these days. It would scare most people to death.’

  The old man was moving along the wall, peering at the faded scenes of Kuran’s bygone days. The more William stared, the more he could see — the painting growing almost luminous and three-dimensional, the grassland extending away into the distance.

  ‘They marked out their properties, drove great mobs of sheep up here, all by themselves, and set up their station houses. Not the mansions that came later — just little shacks in the middle of nowhere. There were no roads, no tracks, and it was maybe twenty miles to the next sign of life, and all you found there anyway was another man, just as alone as you were. For the first ten years there weren’t more than maybe two dozen white people on the whole of the Darling Downs. Now there’s two hundred thousand at least.’

  From the murky wall the horse-riders stared out, their faces white blurs, stoic and impassive. William’s uncle strode amongst them.