Long Gone the Corroboree

by Tony Parsons

  “Would you like me to contact you if I locate Steele?” I asked. I wasn’t going to stuff around being nice to her if she was still up-tight about Steele leaving her.

  “Well… er… if you find him, you could let me know. I’d sure like to know why he walked out on me and sent only one tiny note. Clay’s re-appearance would be newsworthy, too. That and his new book,” Shelley said.

  My next move was to decide what I was going to do. I realised that I should have asked Brenda where Steele’s latest book was set because that could be a big help in nailing down his whereabouts. Authors didn’t usually write about places with which they were unfamiliar. So, I rang her back and asked her.

  “No problem there, Gillian. It’s set in the region of the Glass House Mountains,” Brenda answered without hesitation. “There’s a creek called Jerogeree that features in the story. We can’t find any such creek on a Queensland map, so it’s either a very small creek or its fictional. The only other possibility is that Jerogeree was the original Aboriginal name for the creek Clay writes about,” Brenda said.

  I knew that the Glass House Mountains weren’t far inland from Nambour and therefore, not very far north of Brisbane. If Steele was still living in this region, it shouldn’t be too difficult to locate him. I could say I’d been given the job by my newspaper, which wasn’t too far from the truth. I knew for a fact my old paper would print a story about the missing author like a shot.

  “I’ll take a drive north, Brenda,” I told her.

  “Best of luck, Gillian. I’d like to be going with you,” she said.

  Now that was nice of her. And I thought we’d probably hit it off well, too. You sense that about some people. But I’d become used to travelling solo and making all my own travel arrangements, so I got down to thinking about the trip. If I stayed at caravan parks, the trip shouldn’t cost the earth. I had the money but it seemed a bit over the fence to consider staying at a motel every night. And for how long? That was the question. I reckoned that if Steele was in the vicinity of the Glass House Mountains, it shouldn’t take me too long to locate him. There were ways and means of checking on a district’s inhabitants unless Steele had installed himself in some God-forsaken place out in the bush or set himself up on an island off the coast. Billy Sanders had to be the key. Somebody, some school, would know about Billy. They had to.

  Where to begin? That was the first step. But when I’d considered the matter a little longer, I realised that it didn’t matter much where I began my search for Steele; the important thing was to make a start. So, I packed my Toyota and headed north. My initial destination was Toowoomba which, from all I’d heard, had spawned several recent and very successful country and western artists. There were two major commercial radio stations in Toowoomba plus an ABC station and I’d be very unlucky not to find that one of the various DJs was a walking authority on country and western music.

  There were DJs at both commercial stations who’d played ‘No More Corroboree’ but they couldn’t enlighten me as to the exact whereabouts of Billy Sanders who would surely lead me to Clayton Steele. At 4GR, I was told to talk to their breakfast announcer who knew more about country music than anyone else at the station.

  I stayed the night in Toowoomba and rang the DJ in question at his house later the next day. Greg told me that Billy Sanders lived in the heart of the Glass House Mountains, but exactly where, he couldn’t say.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Positive,” Greg said firmly. “A listener who’d been to Tamworth and heard Billy sing said that he lived fairly close to one of the mountains.”

  Several times I’d flown over the area with its great up-thrust peaks, the remnants of ancient volcanoes. Over the eons, the earth surrounding the core had worn away, leaving towering hills of cooled lava formations. This was the country of Clayton Steele’s ‘No More Corroboree’ and now, all I had to do was pinpoint his exact location.

  I left Toowoomba early and drove north to Hampton where the road branched right and meandered down the Great Dividing Range through the picturesque greens of Ravensbourne’s paddocks and rainforest. At the bottom of the range I veered towards Esk where I headed up the Brisbane Valley Highway, turning right again towards Kilcoy and on past the shimmering waters of Lake Somerset.

  At Kilcoy, I made my first call at a high school. When I enquired about Billy Sanders, the principal looked a bit grim and said it wasn’t department policy to pass out information on students, but in any case, Billy wasn’t a student at his school. I flashed him my sweetest smile and thanked him for his time, repeating that I was actually trying to locate a man by the name of Clayton Steele who’d written the lyrics for a song Billy Sanders had sung at the Tamworth Music Festival. I thought Billy might be able to tell me where I could find Steele.

  The principal softened a mite and said that he didn’t know much about country and western music but he was aware that a boy by the name of Billy Sanders had won a lot of athletic prizes at a recent inter-school meet. He was, as he recalled, an indigenous boy, so he supposed there might be a connection with the song.

  “I don’t suppose you know which school he represented?”

  The principal’s eyes seemed to focus on something a long way off before he finally spoke again. “I’m almost certain it was Beerwah.”

  I thanked him sincerely and climbed into my vehicle feeling quite pleased with my detective work. Beerwah sounded about where I imagined Steele might be. So, I drove towards the township in high spirits.

  On the outskirts of Beerwah I had the most amazing piece of good luck. Well, I thought it was good luck. It was near lunchtime and as I hadn’t eaten anything since my early breakfast, I pulled up outside a small shop advertising pies and sandwiches. Parked next to me was a cream coloured one-tonne utility that was obviously a builder’s truck and, no doubt, its driver had stopped to get himself some lunch.

  When I walked into the shop, I was stopped in my tracks by the whistling coming from a lanky fair-headed bloke standing at the counter. I’d never heard whistling anything like it and while it was remarkable, the tune was unmistakeable: ‘No More Corroboree’.

  “Excuse me,” I began boldly, “But isn’t that ’No More Corroboree’ you’re whistling?”

  The lanky fellow made a 180 degree turn and looked at me with a glint in his eye. “Yeah, that’s what it is,” he said in as good an example of the Australian drawl as I’d ever heard.

  “I’m very interested in locating either the man who wrote the words of that song or the boy who sang it at Tamworth,” I said. No hide, no Christmas box.

  The glint disappeared and the lanky bloke’s gaze hardened. “Yeah, why?”

  I couldn’t say there was menace in the question but there was no warmth either. The man was challenging me, and I didn’t mind at all because his answer suggested that he knew something.

  “There are a lot of people interested in Clayton Steele’s whereabouts,” I said.

  “What are you, a reporter or some kind of private detective?”

  “I’m a journalist and I’ve been looking for Clayton Steele for quite some time,” I admitted.

  “Is that so? Well, my bet is that he doesn’t want people like you nosing about looking for him,” he said roughly.

  “So, you know Clayton Steele?” I pressed.

  “I didn’t say that, but my guess is that if a fellow has parked himself away, he wouldn’t be keen on having a newspaper reporter telling the whole country where he’s to be found.”

  “So, you’re not going to tell me where I can find him?”

  “No way. I don’t hold with newspaper reporters intrudin’ on a man’s privacy. Bloody cheek I call it.”

  “I’ll find Steele whether you help me or not.”

  “Go your hardest.” Then he turned around, paid for his packet of sandwiches and left.

  I watched through the window as the builder climbed into his vehicle. The first thing he did was use his mobile phone, and I guessed he
was ringing Clayton Steele. I heaved a sigh of relief because my chance encounter with the builder convinced me that Clayton Steele wasn’t far away.

  It seemed that the builder might have warned Steele that I was on the prowl, so the big question was whether he would stay in the vicinity or do a bunk. It would depend on how fiercely Steele valued his anonymity. He’d done a great job of staying out of the limelight and it was hard to imagine him changing tack now.

  So, where to begin? I thought the local Shire Council would be as good a place as any, but I found that getting answers from them was tough-going. Even after I spun a yarn about needing to contact Steele because his family wanted to get in touch with him, they assured me that there was no property registered in his name.

  “What about Sanders?” I asked.

  Yes, there was a property owned by a Mrs Lilly Sanders. I wrote down the address, thanked them and left. I felt I was closing in on Clayton Steele. On an impulse, I called at the building which housed the local historical society. I could never explain these impulses but they’d proved fruitful in the past and I was hoping this one would bear fruit, too.

  The small office was staffed by two elderly people, a man and a woman who, I soon ascertained, attended on a purely voluntary basis. They were two of several who came on different days to deal with enquiries.

  “I’m interested in looking at anything you have on the early history of the Glass House Mountains,” I said by way of opening our conversation. “I’d very much like to know if you have any references to a place or a creek called Jerogeree.”

  “As in the song,” the elderly lady said.

  “As in the song,” I agreed.

  “It was an old Aboriginal camping ground. They used to hold big corroborees there and some of the early settlers called the adjacent creek, Jerogeree Creek. It was re-named perhaps a century ago.”

  “You’re very well informed,” I said. In my experience, flattery often paid big dividends.

  “The song has made such an impact that I thought I’d better do some homework on Jerogeree.”

  “You’ve saved me some time.”

  “What’s your interest in the area?” she asked.

  “General,” I said. I wasn’t proposing to discuss Clayton Steele with her. “I’m a journalist and when the song came out and made such a splash, I thought it’d be worthwhile doing some research on the area. I might do a story on Billy Sanders.”

  “Such a sad business that was. I mean, what happened to his mother.”

  “Oh?” I asked, sensing that she was bursting to tell me.

  So, she told me about Lilly Sanders and the attraction she had for men. “She was like that even when she was at high school. She got herself into trouble with the son of the local doctor. Billy’s his son. Lilly was always a stunner and she was… well… precocious. Of course, Aboriginal people are different, aren’t they? Lilly’s almost half white but that bit of Aboriginal blood seems to make a difference. She lived with a part-Aboriginal shearer and while he was away in the sheds, Lilly was seeing a white man. That’s what it was all about. The quarrel, I mean. The shearer took to both of them but he was killed and Lilly was in a coma for months. She’s been in a wheelchair ever since she came out of it. I don’t suppose she deserved that, no matter how loose her morals were.”

  It took me a few moments to think of something to say that didn’t shut the woman down. “You’re very well informed,” I said at last.

  “There was a lot about it in the local paper, dear,” she said with a gloating smile.

  I thanked her for her help and left the small office knowing more than when I entered it. And perhaps, a little more than I wanted to know. I was sure that if I could find the Sanders’ place, someone there might know about Clayton Steele.

  Lilly Sanders’ place wasn’t hard to find, but though there was washing flapping on the line, nobody answered my knocks. A few cows and calves were grazing not far from the high-set bungalow and I spotted fresh tyre marks in front of the garage, so maybe they’d just gone out.

  It could be hours before anyone returned so there was no point in hanging around. I climbed into my car and drove off down the road then stopped at the first house I saw to make some enquiries.

  The neighbouring house wasn’t far away but it was screened by timber, which was why I hadn’t spotted it from the Sanders’ place. It was a difficult house to describe because from the outside, it was more like a glorified cottage, yet of very solid construction. It wasn’t the building that held my early attention but the beauty of the garden in which it was situated. It wasn’t in any sense a formal garden, quite the reverse actually, but the colour and size of the trees and shrubs quite literally stopped me in my tracks. I’d been reared on Sydney’s North Shore, so I’d seen many lovely gardens but never a garden like this one. Trees and shrubs were intermingled so that the creamy flowers of frangipani merged with the red and purple of bougainvillea and the mauve of wisteria with port wine magnolia. There were orange flowers on a vine that had crept half-way up a massive mango tree. Hanging beneath some of the trees were shallow troughs from which gaily coloured lorikeets were feeding noisily. Lower down the gentle slope was a cleared area devoted to vegetables and not far below it and right at the bottom of the gently sloping land was a good-sized creek. Was this Jerogeree Creek?

  If I’d come across this place on my trip to Brazil, I wouldn’t have been taken aback to such an extent because I’d become accustomed to the lushness of the Amazon rainforests, but to find such a wild abundance of colour, perfume and growth here in Queensland was a mind-blowing experience. “Phew,” I breathed. The garden and perfume literally took my breath away. I walked down a winding gravel drive and climbed the steps of the front veranda of the cottage cum house. The front door was open and I called, “Is anyone home?”

  I heard the scrape of a chair then a man appeared in the open doorway. He was wide-chested and dressed in long blue shorts and a blue and white striped polo shirt. His feet were bare and heavily tanned and he had a good head of fair hair and a well-shaped beard.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I began. “I called up at the Sanders’ place and there was nobody at home. I’m looking for Billy Sanders.”

  “Lilly Sanders is away today. She’s having physiotherapy. Billy’s at school,” the bearded man said.

  “A lady at the historical society office told me about Mrs Sanders. Actually, it’s really Billy Sanders I want to see,” I explained.

  “Would you like to come in?” the bearded man asked.

  I hesitated momentarily. It was a place with no close neighbours, so if anything were to happen, I couldn’t expect any help. But the bearded man had a nice-speaking voice and seemed friendly enough without being spooky, so I nodded and followed him into the house. I thought that as I’d survived the Amazon, including a close call with a giant tarantula, not to mention a ducking in the river, I ought to be able to handle this place.

  “Have you come far? Would you like some afternoon tea?” he asked.

  “I’ve come from Toowoomba today. I had some lunch at Beerwah. I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” I said.

  “It’s no trouble.” He filled the kettle and put it on to boil.

  I asked him would he mind if I used his loo and he told me where it was. The toilet and bathroom were at the back of the house and surprisingly modern. The building was actually much bigger than it appeared from the outside. It was tidy too, with fresh flowers in a big vase on the kitchen table.

  “What brings you to Queensland?” he asked. He had to have noted the NSW number plate on my vehicle.

  “I’m looking for someone,” I told him.

  “Ah, a man, I presume,” he said with a smile.

  “Yes, it’s a man but it’s not what you probably imagine. I’m looking for a man who’s been out of circulation for some time. It’s a kind of mystery, as he was a very well-known person before he disappeared,” I said.

  “Intriguing. Who are
you looking for?” he asked.

  “His name is Clayton Steele and he was a best-selling author before he disappeared. I’ve been trying to track him down via Billy Sanders. Billy’s made a big splash with a country and western song that Clayton Steele wrote the words for. I believe he lives somewhere in the vicinity of the Glass House Mountains,” I said.

  “And what’s your interest in finding this Clayton Steele?”

  “It’s a kind of challenge. But above and beyond my interest, there are people who would be relieved to know that Steele is all right. His sister for one, and his publisher. I believe he’s dropped a note or two to his mother but I’m not sure about Steele’s girlfriend. She seemed a lot less keen to know his whereabouts than the last time I rang. My guess is that she’s moved on,” I said.

  “So, what made you home in on this part of Queensland for your search?” The kettle finished boiling and the man poured the contents into a large teapot.

  “I was listening to the ABC one Saturday night. It was the usual country and western epic. I heard Billy Sanders sing ‘No More Corroboree’ and the DJ said the lyrics were by Clayton Steele. A Toowoomba DJ said he’d heard that Billy Sanders lived somewhere near the Glass House Mountains. I visited the historical society in Beerwah and checked out a few details. Someone there mentioned Lilly Sanders and I eventually tracked her down to next door. And so, here I am.”

  “What an extraordinary story. And I suppose, you’re a journalist looking for a big scoop?”

  “Most of my career has been focused on environmental journalism, so it’s not so much a big scoop I’m chasing, as the answer to why a great author would disappear without any explanation and leave several concerned people behind him. Steele seemed to have the world at his feet. I don’t like mysteries and this seemed to be a great mystery to me.”

  “Perhaps he’d grown tired of modern life and wanted to get away from it. As someone interested in the environment, you have to admit that it’s a beautiful area around here. Or perhaps he was ill and imagined he was going to die and wanted to fade out in peace,” he suggested.