The Post at Gundoee

by Amanda Doyle

  ‘The station, please—Central.’

  Lindsay heaved her case into the taxi-driver’s hands and collapsed thankfully into the back seat.

  ‘Central Station,’ the driver echoed nasally, and let in the clutch.

  Lindsay sat holding her fingers tightly together to stop herself from trembling. She was on her way! This was the final, irrevocable step!

  Away down to her right, the harbour could be glimpsed from time to time, calm tracts of sparkling water today, ink-blue, with passing views of jetties and boat-houses, and occasionally a peep at the majestic grey arch of the famous Bridge, now challenged for pride of place among Sydney’s landmarks by the petal-shaped domes of the Opera House.

  She sank back against the worn leather upholstery and marvelled anew at the miracle of having been chosen, recalling her wonder upon opening her own self-addressed envelope and discovering, not only her returned certificates, but a memo which told her that she had been engaged, and giving travelling instructions as well. It had been signed in a pretty, feminine hand—Vera E. Manning (Mrs.).

  Lindsay supposed that Mrs. Manning must be the manager’s wife. Perhaps, with the temporary absence of a proper book-keeper, she had been handling his correspondence for him. In that case, they would be very glad to see Lindsay! For her, the fact that it had been Mrs. Manning who had replied was an added guarantee of her own welcome.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She paid the driver, and picked up her case again, made her way to the ticket office.

  ‘The end of the line, eh?’ the clerk grinned as he punched the date on to her ticket and handed it over.

  She was aware of his curious, good-natured scrutiny. Perhaps her hair was flying away again, although it had been smooth when she left the unit. She had kept the window open in the taxi all the way to the station, though, so it was probably in a mess.

  She hoped this pretty linen-textured suit would create the same good impression upon Mr. and Mrs. Manning as it had upon her last employer. She would have to take care not to spill anything on it in the train, since it was now the only decent article in her wardrobe! Luckily it was virtually non-crushable, and the muted olive colour was at once cool and practical for travelling. She had wrapped her sand-coloured gloves in a piece of tissue and tucked them into the side pocket of her hold-all. They had been washed last night for the occasion, and Lindsay intended to put them on at the very last minute, just as she arrived at Gundooee, so that they would add to her feeling of neatness and poise.

  The train was crowded. By noon the carriage was sweltering and stuffy, in spite of the open window and draught from the corridor. Smuts and flies, sticky paper, children crying with heat and exhaustion, a wedge of sunlight across one’s face and knee, so fiercely penetrating through the glass that it was sheer relief each time the train changed direction and the burning wedge momentarily disappeared.

  Lindsay stared out of the window, determinedly directing her concentration to the passing landscape.

  They were over the Great Dividing Range now, the Blue Mountains with their magnificent, plunging gorges and majestic peaks, the ochre-crusted escarpments and impenetrable, eucalypt-choked gullies were behind them.

  Memory stirred, painfully, uncertainly, in Lindsay, as they traversed the lower slopes of the west side. Her childhood hovered, half imagined, half recognised. The creeks, the poplars, small lush paddocks, lucerne, orchards, lanes. The same, yet not the same. Familiar enough, though, to imbue in the fragile-limbed girl, looking eagerly out of the window, an almost exquisite sense of homecoming. Her green eyes shone with warmth and expectancy.

  Some hours and a couple of hundred miles later, the same green eyes were shining no longer. They were strained with fatigue, wide with dismay, and just the tiniest bit alarmed, too. Lindsay had found her childhood—and lost it again f It was away back there—hours and hours, miles and miles, back there—and the distance between her and it was increasing with every minute that she was being tossed from side to side, alone now in a compartment that swayed with speed as the train seemed suddenly to gather urgency, as if it, too, was wishing the journey over.

  And who could blame it? Not Lindsay, certainly!

  She closed her dust-rimmed eyes against the blatant glare of the endless wastes outside the window. No more friendly hills and little creeks, warm soils and shining kurrajongs. No more pretty green willows and elegant, slim poplars, lively townships, and well-stocked paddocks.

  Here, there was nothing but flat, hard plain, and to Lindsay’s apprehensive eyes, it appeared devoid of vegetation and life, except for the odd patch of twisted scrub, and those funny little dumpy bushes that looked desiccated and unattractively steely in colour.

  Once her heart was gladdened by the sight of a profusely blooming sea of golden mulga blossom, but for the most part the landscape seemed to her desolate and monotonous and awesomely lonely. The occasional austere railway siding, and sometimes a fettler’s hut or high-banked ground tank and windmill were the sole indication of possible human habitation. The few sheep she saw were depressingly lean and wrinkled, with prominent shoulder bones, starved necks and drooping flanks, quite unlike the plump-quartered lambs she thought she could remember.

  Once, at a distance, she caught sight of a larger mob, moving slowly along in a cloud of dust, with a drover’s plant bringing up the rear, and as the carriages clanked noisily over the sleepers—lickety-split, lickety-split, lickety-split—a kangaroo raised his head, on the alert, and rubbed his furry stomach with his fore-paws.

  As the light faded, Lindsay evidenced the strangest metamorphosis in the scene about her. The sky became scorched with flame, seared with gold and scarlet, as the sun sank lower on the ever-distant horizon. The sky colours were harsh in their clarity, but the reflection on the plains was incredibly, wonderfully soft and misty, lending the stretches of gibber and grotesque, stunted trees a rosy dimension of breathtaking beauty.

  Lindsay was entranced. Her spirits lifted a little. This could almost be Clancy’s ‘vision splendid’, she thought, wiping the gathering beads of perspiration from her forehead with a handkerchief which in the morning had been crisp and white, but was now as limp and dusty as its owner. She must be nearing journey’s end, too. Emmadanda could not be far now.

  Emmadanda. That pretty, pretty name! Soon she would arrive there, and then there was just a little hop to Gundooee, and then she would be among the friends and kindly voices of the bush, just like the poem had said.

  The thought of a long, cold drink, perhaps a salad, and a refreshing bath, almost made Lindsay groan aloud with pleasant anticipation.

  With the lowering of the sun, the air became alive with birds—great flocks of brightly coloured parrots, banking clouds of pink and grey galahs, chains of wild duck, all were returning with the coming of night from their daytime feeding grounds to their resting places at the water-holes. In the gathering dusk, a couple of emus, startled by the noise of the train, went pelting off into the scrub with a queer, ungainly, rocking gait, their long legs splaying out in all directions like puppet attachments to their big, plumaged bodies.

  At last the pace slackened. When the train finally stopped, Lindsay took down her case, collected her handbag and holdall, and climbed stiffly down on to the platform.

  Not Emmadanda’s platform. Lindsay found herself gazing blankly at a completely unfamiliar name.

  ‘Emmadanda?’ The man she asked was one of two who had got out of the next carriage. They seemed to be the only other people left on the train besides herself. ‘Emmadanda?’ He stroked his unshaven chin, peered at her curiously. ‘Yer gotta take the motor-train to Emmadanda. It’s the end of the line, see. You arst that bloke over there when ’e’s leavin’. It’s generally about ’arf an hour, once ’e transfers ’is supplies, see.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Lindsay forced her lips to smile. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Any time.’ Her informant spat neatly into the space between the siding and the train, and sauntered af
ter his mate. ‘Say, Herb,’ she heard him call to the man already busy loading crates and boxes into a single-carriaged motorised affair, ‘you gotta passenger fer Emma—a sheila, too, yer lucky coot!’

  ‘That right? You want to swop?’ They exchanged grins in the half dark, but Lindsay’s own presence now precluded a further exchange. The second man threw a couple of canvas bags into his little motor-train, and then turned to Lindsay.

  ‘You wouldn’t be L. H. Dutten, I reckon,’ he stated tentatively.

  ‘That’s right Lindsay Dutten.’

  ‘Dinkum?’—sceptically. ‘Then, in that case, this message is for you.’ He fished in the breast pocket of his soiled khaki shirt. ‘There’s more light up in the cab if you can’t see it too good.’

  ‘Er—thanks.’ She took the scrap of paper, unfolded it, read the message, her eagerness wilting.

  It had no beginning. No end. It simply said—

  ‘Stay at pub in Emma overnight Mail-plane leaves for Gundooee 10 a.m. Don’t miss it.’

  ‘Message received and understood?’ The driver slung her case into the rear van compartment, slammed the door.

  ‘Yes, thank you. Understood,’ Lindsay mumbled. She felt numb with tiredness, unable to think of anything except this terrible sense of anti-climax. It was, after all, a very crude note, she excused herself.

  ‘Good-oh! It seemed quite clear when I took it over the transceiver, and then I began to wonder who in tarnation to give it to. I reckon I was lookin’ out for a man—not that they said, one way or the other,’ he added quickly, taking in Lindsay’s quick flush and arrested expression.

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Emmadanda? Is it far?’ If it is, I’ll never make it, she was thinking desperately. If it’s far, I can’t go on, even if it means missing that wretched mail-plane in the morning.

  ‘ ’Bout forty minutes, that’s all. You must’ve come all the way, eh? Reckon you look plain tuckered out.’

  She smiled wanly.

  ‘Yes, I think I must be—er—tuckered out. I’m glad it’s no further than that.’

  ‘Hop in, then. Sit there near the window, and you’ll get all the breeze that’s goin’.’

  ‘Do you live in Emmadanda?’ she asked, above the noise of the motor.

  ‘Gawd, no! I come back here tonight. My missus and the kids is here, see. I just do this Emma run twice a week—to oblige the authorities, like.’ He gave her his pleasant grin once more, and after smiling back politely, Lindsay relapsed into silence. Her legs were stiff, cramped, her brain somehow paralysed.

  Never mind, she told herself bracingly, if you aren’t at Gundooee tonight, with its friendly bush greeting and kindly voices, at least you’ll be at Emmadanda. Just forty minutes to that pretty little town with the quaintly pretty name, nestling in the bend of a cool, green river. There might not be jacarandas lining the streets—because Lindsay realised that this was hardly jacaranda country—but there would be a real bush welcome waiting for her at Emmadanda.

  ‘And the bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him

  In the murmur of the breezes, and the river on its bars.

  And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plans extended ’

  Lindsay had seen the sunlit plains—desolate, awesomely lonely, she had been reluctantly forced to acknowledge their splendour in the light of the setting sun. Now the sunlit plains were behind her, and around her—out there in the dark, was only the solitariness of the great Australian bush, but Emmadanda lay ahead.

  She eased her weary shoulders, lifted her cheek to the breeze from the window, and took a steadying breath of anticipation. Dear, quaint little Emmadanda was just around the corner—or rather, dead ahead, since there appeared to be no corners on these wide expanses of plain.

  ‘Here we are, then.’ The driver drew up without warning, hauling on the brakes, and there was an answering squeal of protest from almost every mechanised part of the motor. He opened the door, waved a hand vaguely into the darkness, and said grandly, ‘Emma! There she is!’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Lindsay breathed, to his retreating back, because he had already started to unload his cargo.

  She stepped down, looked about her, blinked I Then she looked—and blinked—again. Disbelievingly.

  ‘Is—is this Emmadanda?’ Her voice was husky, but she managed, somehow, to take her case when the man passed it out to her.

  ‘Mm?’ He was totally preoccupied.

  ‘The—the hotel?’ she suggested, almost fearfully.

  A jerk of the head. ‘That’s her—the pub. Hardly grand enough to be called a hotel, I reckon.’

  Or even a pub, thought Lindsay bleakly, eyeing the long outline of a tin-roofed shack with misgiving.

  ‘D-do I just go in?’ She could scarcely whisper.

  ‘Well, there ain’t a commissionaire, if that’s what you’re waiting for,’ came the laconic retort.

  ‘G-goodnight. Goodbye.’

  ‘So long, miss.’

  Lindsay picked up her case, looked up and down the street. There was only one, so wide that it wasn’t even a thoroughfare, really—just a bit of the hard-baked plain, with a few houses scattered about They all had the same corrugated iron roofs, shining ghostly in the thin moonlight. One had a window full of tins. Lindsay could see the columns of stacked groceries in the building right next to her. Further down was a shed with two petrol bowsers close beside it. The hotel, the pub, was in between. It was the only dwelling with a balcony, a hideous skirting of wrought iron, peeling and rusty, ludicrously Victorian in this setting. It sat on raised blocks to elevate it from its less important neighbours, which squatted disconsolately in the dust. Over the top was a long board with faded lettering. The word ‘Welcome’ stood out in black capitals, and underneath, in smaller print, Lindsay could discern ‘Harry Meehan, Prop.’

  She swallowed, lifted her case, went up the steps, along the veranda, past a window beyond which flickered a kerosene lamp, and into a narrow hall.

  What followed was mercifully vague. Not that Harry Meehan and his wife weren’t kind—they were! They welcomed her with interest, even excitement, since they did not get many visitors out here in Emma—‘Plenty of boozers, but not residents' Harry had explained. They plied her with tucker, because she looked dead beat—‘Fancy a sheila, such a young slip of a one at that, comin’ out here on ’er own, eh! Now you get some of that into you, and a good strong cup of tea, and you’ll soon be jake.’

  Lindsay found that her appetite had mysteriously fled. She made a gallant attack on the salt beef and fresh damper, but finally had to admit defeat. The tea was heaven-sent, and fortified her sufficiently to enable her to reach the room they pointed out, and to follow Mrs. Meehan on a conducted tour of the plumbing facilities.

  ‘You stand under and pull on that rope and the water’ll come down when the bucket tips, see,’ Mrs. Meehan obligingly demonstrated the shower. ‘Don’t worry if the colour’s queer, the tank’s a bit low, that’s all. We don’t have it piped to the showers. Some of them blokes in the bar would be standing: under it all day long to revive themselves after a bender if we did, and it’s our scarcest commodity out here. Don’t you worry, though—you just use what you want,’ she told Lindsay generously.

  At the door of Lindsay’s room, she giggled.

  ‘Don’t forget to soap yourself before you up-end the bucket—it’s a common mistake with beginners.’

  ‘I won’t. Goodnight, and thank you, Mrs. Meehan.’

  By the time Lindsay had manipulated the strange shower, cleaned her teeth in the brackish water, drawn on her pyjamas, and crawled miserably beneath the mosquito net that graced her lumpy stretcher, she couldn’t think at all. Which was maybe a good thing!

  CHAPTER 3

  Morning brought the birds back. They flew overhead, calling raucously, piercing deep into Lindsay’s unconscious state. Plumbing the depths of her exhausted slumber, their sounds were like anguished s
creams from an avian Underworld.

  She threw off the sheet and crawled out from beneath the mosquito net, poured water from an aluminium pitcher into the shallow pan on the washstand, and splashed her face. Then she dressed with care, paying more than her usual attention to her make-up. Whatever happened, she intended to meet her fate with outward composure, even though the leaden ball of anticlimax still rolled around slowly inside her stomach.

  Gundooee could hardly be worse than this! From the small window in the dining-room, the view offered nothing more than the now hideously familiar brown distances, broken by a single clump of shade-trees near the pub, from which came the dismal and recurring carr-carr-carr of the crows that festooned the upper branches.

  ‘They don’t go away to feed like the others,’ explained Mrs. Meehan, passing her a cornflake packet and a jug of reconstituted milk. ‘Hang about ’ere all day, that lot will, waitin’ for scraps from the garbage. Git out of ’ere, youse black scavengers, you!’ she yelled, flinging the window wide and hurling one of the small stones that lined the sill, presumably left there for just such a purpose.

  The birds lifted themselves out of range with harsh screeching cries, spread their wings and closed them again, sinking back on to their scrawny perches and eyeing the building patiently.

  ‘See,’ repeated Mrs. Meehan triumphantly, ‘nothink’ll move ’em!’

  Lindsay guessed that the whole thing had become something of a ritual between the hotel proprietress and the crows, and that Mrs. Meehan would have been surprised and disappointed if her onslaught had had any other result than the one it habitually did. It was probably one small amusement with which to relieve the monotony of another day in Emmadanda, Lindsay thought, with a twinge of sympathy for the thin, sun-browned woman at her side.