Country
Page 4
Dressed in a broad, battered hat, boots, and a belt sporting a prominent buckle, Sandy personified the Australian grazier. His arms and hands looked strong enough to hold down a bull, but like so many who drive everywhere in this extensive country he was a little overweight and underdeveloped in the leg department. It may have been just the type, but I felt sure that I had seen him before. A cold beer was thrust in my hand as I entered the kitchen and met the family, and Sandy was soon explaining how he liked to drink champagne—the $3.50 per bottle Great Western variety—and how I’d always be welcome if I brought a case, when I saw the National Geographic magazine in pride of place on the table. There, on the cover of an issue that celebrated Australia’s bicentenary, was Sandy McTaggart and son—symbols of the nation.
People cling proudly to their traditions in the Murchison, but it was clear that the end must be near for much of this clapped-out land, at least under its present use. Many graziers had been reduced to harvesting feral goats to pay school fees and put bread on the table. And such were prices then that a goat destined for the Middle East live meat trade fetched more at the dockside than a fat Murchison wether. I was particularly interested in Sandy’s views on kangaroos, as I felt that a sustainable harvest of them might ease grazing pressure on the overcropped pasture and add another line of income to the local economy. To my dismay, however, Sandy told me that the red kangaroo—the mainstay of the shooting industry in Australia’s drier regions—was now uncommon in the district, while its smaller and less valued cousin, the e mained abundant.
The euro or hill-kangaroo is the most widely distributed of all kangaroo species. Except for the cold southeast, it is found wherever suitable habitat exists. If you have ever seen a male of the eastern subspecies (also known as the wallaroo), which inhabits the Great Dividing Range, you are unlikely to forget it. They are great, black, shaggy, muscular beasts resembling the mythical yowie as much as anything else. With its massive forearms, short ears and a propensity to hop in a more upright posture than other roos, a male euro moving through its hilly habitat is doubtless the origin of at least some yowie sightings—by ‘jolly’ swagmen and inexperienced bushwalkers alike.
Away from the Great Dividing Range the euro varies greatly in appearance. Around Broken Hill in western New South Wales they are often reddish-black, while in Western Australia the coat is a rich mahogany, and less shaggy. The females are usually lighter in colour than the males, and only half their size. Among the euro’s greatest assets are the soles of its feet, which possess a most magnificent pad, so expansive, tough and well buffered by an underlying layer of fat as to resemble a pneumatic tyre. Thus armed, it can hop effortlessly over the rockiest of hillsides.
Western Australian sheep-men have long harboured a deep antipathy for the euro. Throughout the 1950s and 60s—that golden age when wool was worth a pound per pound and merino rams rode in the front seats of Rolls Royces—the graziers of the Pilbara (a region lying to the north of the Murchison District) were missing out, for their flocks dwindled while their paddocks filled with euros. Certain that the euros were pushing the sheep out, they called for scientific help, and Tim Ealey, a student at Monash University, was sent to investigate.
Known to his colleagues as ‘the eurologist’, Ealey is a singular personality, well equipped to deal with months of field work in difficult country. He discovered that euros do not need to drink most of the time, and when they do they can get by on less than half the water needed for a sheep or goat. Part of their secret lies in not letting any moisture out. Euro scats are so dry (among the driest produced by any creature) that you can light a fire with their turds de jour—and they are miserly pissers as well, possessing the ability to recycle urea through saliva (and thence to the gut), thereby avoiding the necessity of urinating. Their best trick, though, is being able to survive on the least nutritious of vegetation, the spiky spinifex grass that is at once an ornament to, and the horror of, the inland. (You will only understand the horror of spinifex if you have tried to walk through it—suffice to say that it can turn even a camel’s legs black and hairless.) So efficient is the euro’s gut, and so limited the creature’s energy needs, that if cardboard boxes grew on bushes the euro would likely thrive by eating those as well.
Armed with this knowledge it was easy for Tim to see why the sheep of the Pilbara had ceased breeding and were withering away from starvation, while the euros continued to multiply. But Ealey found that the euros were not replacing the sheep without assistance—the sheep-men were helping them. For decades the graziers had been severely degrading their pastures through overstocking. As a result, sheep and even red kangaroos were unable to sustain themselves and the euros, which had once kept to the sterile hills, now inherited the blighted plains. Thus the rise of the euro had not been brought about by its superior competitive abilities, but by a wholesale collapse of the ecosystem.
I explained to Sandy that an abundance of euros away from the rocky ranges is a fair indicator that the country has been well and truly flogged. I then went on to say that the scenario that had occurred in the Pilbara decades earlier was now playing out further south. We both knew that the sheep industry was dead in the Pilbara, so the conversation was not an easy one. Tragically, the situation meant that not even native marsupials can contribute to economic viability—the reds are gone and the euros are too small and elusive to be attractive to roo shooters.
My speech at the meeting the following morning did not go down well. Most of the audience lived with the problem of environmental degradation every day of their lives, and they hardly needed an outsider lecturing them on the finer points of the issue. Question time began when a grazier who resembled an overwound spring leapt to his feet and exclaimed that city experts were always giving out useless information, and the best thing would be if they all took a half cut in pay. When a second questioner accused me of expecting them all to live like savages, Muggon Bill rose to save the day. ‘Time to open the bar,’ he said as the clock struck 9 am. In the more convivial atmosphere that soon developed, a group of graziers spoke of the difficulty of their situation, and of their eagerness to conserve the native species that remained on their properties.
That evening we regrouped at the big tent in the showground for the annual dinner. After the main course Jock McSporran (who looked remarkably Scottish) announced that well-known local identity Luigi the shearer would entertain us with a rendition of ‘Ave Maria’, ‘O Sole Mio’ and ‘Back to Sorrento’! Shouts of approval shook the tent as Luigi, a portly Italian whose tenor voice would have been passable in any shearing shed, rose to his feet. I respectfully knocked back a few beers as he sang, after which the MC informed us that young Jacko would continue the entertainment with a rendition of Tina Turner’s classic ‘Simply the Best’.
I was sure that I’d had a beer too many when I saw a young black man dressed in drag slink onto the stage, a mophead perched on his cranium and balloons for a bosom. He got a few laughs as he strode around, shaking his extravagant breasts and striking the air with a clenched fist. But the best was yet to come. After a quick costume change our singer re-emerged as Al Jolson. He burned through ‘The Old Folks at Home’ and was starting in on ‘My Mammy’ when he sidled up to the only well-dressed couple in the audience. Clearly the local aristocracy, the man looked very pukka in his tie and jacket, while madame’s blue rinse and evening dress would have been respectable in Perth Casino. They were the only people not laughing as ‘Al’ approached. Indeed the woman looked close to panic as Jacko got down on one knee, looked lovingly into her eyes and crooned: ‘Mammy, Mammy, I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles, My Maaaa-mmy!’ It was a finale that brought the house down.
Sandy had promised to take me out to Mount Narryer the following morning, and as we drove we came across the most magnificent brahmin bulls I’d ever seen, their great grey bodies shooting out of the scrub in a cloud of red dust as they wheeled to challenge us. ‘That’s Dishwasher,’ said Sandy’s wife Carol,
pointing, ‘that’s Hoover, and that’s Holiday.’ The family had decided exactly what they’d bring when they were sold. ‘Jeez, they’ve grown up quick,’ said Sandy in quiet awe. ‘Well overdue for the doctor,’ he added a little nervously. As I watched a tonne of muscle pawing the ground in defiance, I wondered about the wisdom of approaching those creatures with the intent of robbing them of their masculinity. It was also a lesson for me on how hard it sometimes is for someone like Sandy, who is a sheep-man to his boots, rather than a cattle-man, to diversify his business.
For me the journey to Mount Narryer was a spiritual excursion. I had my children with me (Emma aged ten and David aged twelve) and wanted to show them this special place. Sandy explained that he had bought the pastoral lease over the Mount Narryer block as an anniversary present for his wife. She had an interest in geology, and land values were such that it had cost him less than a decent diamond ring.
Soon we emerged into the stony country surrounding the low range, and before us an undistinguished hill rose above the mulga. Red-brown and eroded into boulders on top, it had stood above the surrounding plain for eons. More than a trillion sunrises and sunsets had played over it, and it had watched over the creation of life, from humble bacteria to humanity itself. The rock that formed the hill had solidified before the atmosphere was breathable, before the sea was blue and the land green. And inside that rock were zircons dating back 3.9 billion years—close to the time Earth formed. Here, confronting myself and my children, was the yawning chasm of time, as wide and blue as the Murchison sky and as endless as the surrounding arid plain. I have never felt so insignificant, nor so correctly calibrated against the universe.
4
The Last of the Frontier
In 1975, though, it was Port Hedland that loomed on the horizon, and with it the greatest challenge for our old roadsters—1200 kilometres of dirt road leading to Halls Creek. Although it gloried in the moniker National Highway No. 1, the road turned out to be a nightmare of bull-dust and corrugations: the Guzzis were soon shaken apart as screws dropped out, glass exploded into shards and the heavy fenders threatened to snap in half. There was just one petrol stop in the 600 kilometres between Port Hedland and Broome—the Sandfire Flats roadhouse. We’d seen it signposted and, exhausted and low on fuel, we hauled ourselves up its long dirt track. It consisted of a couple of shipping containers and a metal box structure for a bar, plonked down in the sand with a petrol bowser in front. Out back lay a graveyard—hundreds of cars, trucks and motorbikes that the road had beaten. The entire place was as dismal a purgatory as any I had seen and was also, we would learn, as difficult to escape as the real thing.
As we pulled up to the bowsers a distracted-looking man standing by his car approached us and began pleading for help. He had arrived two days earlier, he said, and needed petrol to continue south. It had been 45 degrees Celsius in the shade when he arrived; the owner, let’s call him Barry, began to fill his vehicle while smoking a cigarette. When the customer had mumbled something about a fire hazard, Barry had become irate and announced that he wouldn’t serve the ‘bloody whinger’ at all. For three long days he had proved as good as his word. We had, I concluded, reached the frontier.
We found Barry in the airconditioned interior of the metal box, propping up the bar. He was a man for whom, judging by his ravaged features, the sun was always below the yardarm; and Sandfire Flats was a terrible place to have gone to fat. Photos on the wall showed the place when all that could be seen in the sea of scrub was a truck with a 44-gallon drum on its tray-back with a younger Barry standing atop it, serving fuel with a hand pump.
As we finished our beer in the shade of the petrol bowser’s pergola, a thin man with a pinched face sidled up to me. He said that he was being paid to paint the shipping containers. He’d been there for months but he hadn’t done very much because he was paid in beer. We told him that we were riding around Australia. ‘Watch out for those bloody donkeys,’ he said. ‘They stand with their arse to yer, and yer can’t see them because their stripe looks like the line down the middle of the road. Hit one and you’ll have a face full of donkey-arse at one hundred kilometres per hour. And watch out for the bloody Abos too. Can’t trust the bastards, mate. They’ll do you if they can!’
That evening Bill and I rode on into the waning light for an hour or so before pulling off into the mulga, still over 200 kilometres from Broome. We travelled light so camping was a pretty rough business. On this night we stretched out our pieces of foam and lay under the stars, me sleeping in an old World War II dispatch rider’s uniform I’d picked up at an army disposals, Bill in a light sleeping bag. We dropped off to sleep straight away, but were awoken around midnight by voices close at hand. People were talking excitedly in the harsh, guttural tones so characteristic of the Aboriginal languages. My imagination ran riot, and I was instantly gripped with a fear that Europeans have experienced ever since the first explorers pushed into the tribal lands of Australia. Had they found us, and if so would they attack us?
A few minutes later it became clear that they had no idea that Bill and I were just a few yards away, and my fear began to abate. It must have been an uncanny coincidence that they had pulled off the road just where we had. We figured that it was only a matter of time before they discovered us, so I decided to take the initiative. With my heart pounding, I placed our largest shifting spanner in my back pocket, and walked towards the voices.
Two old Holden station wagons were pulled up by the light of a newly kindled fire, and men, women and children huddled around a billy. An old man, who was talking to a youth holding a tyre lever, cut his conversation mid-sentence as he saw me approach. I was trembling with fright at this, my first meeting with Aborigines, and their sudden silence and shocked looks did nothing to reassure me. The old man pointed to the flat tyre and mumbled that they had been to a wedding at Meekatharra and were on their way back to Broome. ‘Oh… right. Good night,’ I replied, while trying to act as if it was the most normal thing in the world for us to meet that way, at such a time and place. As soon as I walked into the darkness they took off without fixing their puncture or enjoying their tea. It was a long time before I could sleep, kept awake with fright and thinking about those people we had so unexpectedly met. And why the almost primal fear?
Just before dawn I was awoken yet again—this time by pain in my right shoulder. I thought it might be a snakebite, then discovered that the culprit was either a scorpion or centipede, for the wet season was on its way and the ground was covered with their tracks. The pain got worse, and with it came a paralysis of my right arm. It was clear that I could not ride that day, so we hid my bike in the scrub and I rode pillion on Bill’s. Eighty kilometres from Broome Bill’s bike began to splutter. We had run out of fuel. We waited a couple of hours beside the track, a few cars and trucks whizzing by before an old tray-back hove into view and stopped beside us. It was filled with Aboriginal people—mostly young men—smiling and laughing in anticipation of a visit to town. They told us that they had come from La Grange mission, and they not only took us aboard but hoisted our bike onto the tray as well.
On the outskirts of Broome our truck passed one of those sights that, in the heat of the desert, you’re not sure you’ve seen at all. An old man, whose intensely black face was framed in a mane of pure-white hair and a great, bushy white beard, and dressed in what looked to be a white dress-shirt and black trousers—the remnants of a tuxedo perhaps—was riding a bicycle. As we roared past he became engulfed in a cloud of dust, and looking back we saw that he had ridden into the gutter where he stood shaking his fist at us. His name was Lawrence Williams, a young man in the tray-back told me.
By the time we got to Broome I felt sufficiently recovered to skip the doctor’s, and we wasted no time completing our business and making our way back south. But when we arrived at our old campsite we were aghast to discover that my precious Moto Guzzi was gone. Stolen! Who would have done such a thing? Despairing, we continued on to Sand-fi
re Flats to ask Barry if he knew anything. ‘It’s the bloody Abos, mate,’ he said flatly after I explained what had happened. ‘They’d steal any-fuckin-thing.’
I sat in deep shock, uncertain of what to do, when the drunk who had warned us of donkeys sidled up to me. ‘I’m getting out of here, mate,’ he confided, then walked towards a wreck of a car—sans doors and bonnet—a few metres away. It evidently also lacked a starter-motor, for beside it stood two withered Aboriginal women whose job it was to push-start the vehicle. Before the machine jumped to life with a ghastly clatter and shot off in a cloud of black smoke, the drifter turned to me and said, ‘Have a look round the back.’
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I started to wander in the square-kilometre graveyard of wrecked vehicles, and before long saw the distinctive blue shape of my bike’s fuel tank. With all the outrage a young man can muster I confronted Barry with this evidence of his perfidy. ‘Oh, you mean that bike,’ he said with a smirk. ‘I’ll have to charge you towage for that. If I hadn’t brought it in the Abos would have got it, for sure.’ Feeling angry and foolish beyond reckoning, Bill and I bolted without paying the mooted towage. A kilometre or so out we saw the drifter, his car dead by the side of the road, walking slowly back towards Sandfire.
Every Australian outback town seems to have a caravan park, and such is their allure, or perhaps economy and convenience, that a wide cross-section of humanity can often be found there. Kombi-driving hippies, grey nomads, washed-up workers doing it tougher than you would think possible, they all converge in these homes away from home. Perhaps caravan parks are the last refuge of the Australian ideal of mateship, where high and low, fortunate and forlorn, gather together in a common quest for shelter and where, on 25 December, a motley assortment of Austral humanity gives thanks for the birth of our Saviour. The beachside Broome caravan park, filled with mango trees dangling delicious fruit, looked like a paradise when we arrived a few days before Christmas 1975.