Brumby Plains

by Joanne Van Os

  Vincent took a breath and went on. ‘When that other boy die, I run and run and run and run. I hide in the bush and I find Malarrimun people, and tell them what happened. They look after me, grow me up with them. That old man in the cave, that his bones back there. He carried this stone because it’s a story belonging to the sacred thing. Like a badge. Only the person who can touch the sacred thing carries this stone. And that bird you saw, that black and white bird, that his totem. Mine too. His spirit walking around in that bird now. He make you dream about everything after you been in the cave. Must be he wanted you to find this thing.’

  He stood up. ‘Come on, my boy. We’ll go back now. I got to think about all of this and talk to them old men back at Malarrimun, what we gunna do about all this.’ He cradled the precious bark package, and set off down the slope.

  The wet season was over. The ‘knock ’em down’ storms had flattened the tall stands of spear grass and blown the last of the clouds and humidity from the air. The sky had a particular blue clarity about it that only the dry season brought. Sam eased the hat from his head and lay back on the warm grass. He could hear birds calling, wind sighing lightly in the branches above him, and the chatter of the creek nearby. George, Tess and Darcy sat beside him, finishing the last of the lunch they’d brought with them. It was the Easter holidays, four months after the excitement of the previous Christmas, and the first time they had all been together since the end of the holidays.

  This was also the first time they had been back to the Arm since the night they had been caught by the bird smugglers. Without even discussing it, they had all been of the same opinion about the cave – they were not going back to it. It was off limits now that they knew its dreadful history. Instead they had continued along the bottom of the Arm till they came to the little creek that ran beside it, still within sight of the shadow on the hill marking the cave entrance.

  ‘Sam, do you think much about that night?’ asked Tess, eyeing him from under her hat.

  Sam closed his eyes. ‘Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if Vincent and Charles hadn’t turned up in time.’ He shuddered involuntarily.

  ‘But those blokes are locked up now,’ said George with relish. ‘And for a long time too.’

  ‘So how much was the reward in the end?’ asked Darcy.

  ‘I dunno exactly,’ said Sam, ‘but it means that we won’t lose the station. And it must have been a fair bit, because there was enough for Mum and Dad to put money aside.’

  ‘Yeah,’ snorted George in disgust. ‘For our education! Mum told me that there was enough money put aside to send the four of us to university. That’s the thanks we get for saving the station – school?’

  Tess looked up at the towering bulk of the Arm. She could just make out the shadow of the cave and the banyan above it, some distance away.

  ‘That story about Vincent, all those years ago – it’s awful to think that it actually happened here,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Remember what he said about not being able to have proper ceremonies at Malarrimun? Norrie told me a few weeks ago that there was going to be a really important ceremony soon, one they’d never had before.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Vincent told us too. He said it’s the first time in about seventy years that this ceremony has come into his country. But before that happens, they’re having a special ceremony up on the ridge, to quieten down the spirits of the old people, he said. He told me to listen out when we came here today.’

  And as if in answer to Sam’s words, the hollow sound of distant clapsticks and the low haunting tones of the didgeridoo drifted out across the trees. They could hear voices too, a vibrating and resonant chanting that rose and fell in time with the music. Vincent was laying the disturbed spirits to rest.

  As Sam listened, he heard another note amongst the distant voices, and looked up into the tree above him. A banded fruit dove had landed on a branch just a few feet over his head, and added its soft deep coos to the song from the ridge. Sam felt as if the bird was speaking to him, and he felt his own spirit lift and lighten. Vincent had told him that the old men had decreed that this bird was now Sam’s totem too, and that it would always look out for him.

  The bird sat in the small tree for a few more moments, and as the song on the ridge died away, it flew back to the sandstone country.

  The banded fruit dove (Ptilinopus cinctus) also known as a banded pigeon, is found only in the sandstone escarpment of western Arnhem Land. It is a graceful, black and white bird about 350 mm in length, with a yellow beak and red legs and feet. It feeds mainly on the fruits of rainforest trees, such as figs. Its call is a single deep coo, or hoot.

  A bullcatcher is a modified four-wheel drive vehicle used for catching wild buffalo and cattle.

  A bionic arm is an invention that is mounted on the bullbar of a bullcatcher, and is operated by a winch. As the buffalo gallops alongside the bullcatcher a heavy steel arm – the bionic arm – is swung over the buffalo’s neck and pins the buffalo to the side of the vehicle without hurting it. Then the buffalo is loaded into a truck to be taken elsewhere. This method has been widely used for catching wild buffalo in the Northern Territory.

  Buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) are not native to Australia. Small numbers of buffalo were introduced to the Northern Territory from Timor between 1824 and 1843, to supply the early settlements with meat. They thrived in the Top End and quickly increased in numbers. Over the years buffalo have been harvested for their extremely thick hides, which were used in the 1880s for industrial belting, and for their meat. Today buffalo are domesticated and farmed for live export, human consumption and milk production in many parts of Australia. They still run wild (feral) in parts of the Northern Territory, but in much smaller numbers than before.

  Strange breakfast food: people in Darwin really do eat things like satays, curries and hot, spicy Asian foods for breakfast! Every Saturday morning hundreds of people head for the Parap Markets for breakfast, just the way it’s described in this story.

  I owe a big thank you to the following people who helped bring Brumby Plains to life: Northern Territory writers Kim Caraher and Cathy Applegate for their professional advice and comments; the Northern Territory Writers Centre for assistance with the early editing; Les Woodbridge and Wayne Miles for information about smuggling and bush airstrips (not through personal experience, of course); and my old mate Gavin Perry for giving life to one of the major characters. I am indebted to the Administrator of the Northern Territory, the Hon. Ted Egan AO, for his encouragement and his experienced opinion in some crucial areas of the story.

  It’s been such a pleasure to work with editors Jo Jarrah and Roberta Ivers at Random House again. Heartfelt thanks to them both, and to my publisher Linsay Knight and my agent Selwa Anthony for their continued unqualified support and encouragement.

  Finally, and most of all, my deepest appreciation and thanks to my husband Lex and my children Callum, Shaun and Ali, who make everything worthwhile.

  Joanne van Os first came to the Northern Territory in 1976, and has spent most of the years since then living in the bush on stations not unlike Brumby Plains, and in remote Aboriginal communities. The characters Sam and George are an amalgamation of a lot of the children she has met out bush, including her own two sons. Joanne now lives in Darwin with her husband and daughter. Brumby Plains is her second book.

  For more information and updates about Joanne and her books, visit her website at: www.joannevanos.com

  The adventure continues in Castaway

  Get ready for a brand new adventure!

  If you liked Brumby Plains, perhaps your parents will like Outback Heart, Joanne van Os’ memoir of life in the Northern Territory with her husband, Rod Ansell, who was known by many as ‘the original Crocodile Dundee’. Here’s an extract that captures the essence of life in the outback, as well as the trials and tribulations of a young, naïve woman growing up the hard way.

  Outback Heart

  From Chap
ter 9, ‘A Sojourn Down South’

  We bought an old station wagon in Murgon to drive back to the Territory. We had left all our gear at Coolibah when we’d finished with the stock camp, so we headed for Bradshaw Station. Once again we had very little money, and none in sight unless we could secure a contract somewhere. After all the excitement and action of movie making, everything now seemed a bit of an anticlimax. We reached the Victoria River crossing at the end of March 1979, but our messages had gone astray and no one from Bradshaw was there to meet us. Rod fired a couple of shots in the air hoping to attract someone’s attention at the homestead, but no one came. He was never good at waiting. After an hour, he said: ‘I’m going to swim across and walk up to the homestead.’

  I was horrified. Even the dogs were tied up so they wouldn’t be tempted into the water. It was about 300 metres to the other side. ‘Wouldn’t it be better just to drive into Timber Creek and ring the station from there?’ I said, knowing I was wasting my time.

  ‘Nope. Be dark by the time we got back here. There’s a couple of big planks of timber over there. I’m going to tie them together and push across quietly. It’ll be okay.’

  He got the timber ready, and then told me to get the rifle out of the car: ‘Just watch me through the scope, and if you see any crocs coming at me, blow them away.’

  ‘You realise you’re in more danger of me shooting you than a croc getting you,’ I said, only half joking.

  ‘You’re a better shot than that. Just keep watching the water around me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  It took him about fifteen minutes to get across the river, but it felt like hours. I trained the scope on him the whole way across, scanning the surface of the river every few seconds for the legions of salties I was sure would appear. He dragged the planks up on the other side, waved at me, and trotted off up the bank heading for the homestead.

  I put the rifle away and sat in the car. Was I a coward, I wondered, because I would rather have taken the safer route of driving back to use the phone, or was I just not prepared to take a risk which would save time and inconvenience? I did think it would be a lot more inconvenient to be grabbed by a crocodile in the middle of the Vic, though.

  I was in a strange environment. It wasn’t my natural place, and I was dependent on Rod to interpret it for me, because I didn’t have a set of guidelines of my own that fitted. The ironic thing is, had I been on my own, I would have managed. But I had my knight in shining armour explaining it all to me, and I think I saw it as an affirmation of his love, that he was so keen to show me his world and for me to love it the way he did. I was convinced that he knew more about everything than anyone else. Rod was a natural teacher, and I was a star-struck student at his feet. So in the end I accepted that what might have been logical in the city wasn’t necessarily logical out here, and that apparently desperate measures were just part of the currency in the bush.

  Our good friend Gavin Perry came out to Bradshaw to spend a few days with us. Gavin and I had become good mates since Rod introduced us. We had a lot in common, not least of all feeling totally inadequate in the bush around Rod, so I had an ally in my ‘embarrassing’ city origins when Gavin was around. We had a similar sense of humour, especially a deep appreciation of Monty Python.

  Gavin had first come to the Kimberley in 1974, and was working on a friend’s grapefruit orchard when I met him in 1977. He had lived with Rod at various times, and was the perfect foil – the eccentric out-of-place Englishman to Rod’s straight, outback Australian. Where Rod wore moleskins, riding boots and a hat, Gavin was resplendent in a colourful Hawaiian style shirt, shorts or a sarong, sandals and a battered straw hat if he wore one at all. He viewed the people and the culture around him with a sense of delighted astonishment that never seemed to wane, and which reminded me that there was always another way to look at what I was seeing. Admittedly, when it came to Rod, I was not quite so objective.

  We shared a love of photography, and he encouraged me to keep recording what I was seeing around me: ‘This country is quite bizarre, you know. No one will believe you if you don’t take photographs. Look at bull catching! I mean, where else in the world do people do this stuff? Risking life and limb hurtling through the bush in these ridiculous jeeps, smashing into trees and rocks, flattening an enormous bull and jumping out to tie it up with a belt, just to sell it to the meatworks for a couple of dollars …’

  One day we were helping Dick Gill to take a load of fuel across the Victoria River, and Gavin came along with us. After we had spent a couple of hours wrestling 44-gallon drums of Avgas and petrol off the truck and down the river bank and through the mud, we watched as the first load was towed across the river by a little dinghy piloted by Frank Clarke, the grader driver on the station. The drums were roped together in pairs, their tops just clear of the water as they bobbed along behind the boat, which was barely making headway against the current. Sometimes the tide would turn sooner than expected, and the dinghy, fuel drums and the hapless ferry-man would be washed downstream, fetching up against a little island until the tide turned again.

  Gavin turned to me, shaking his head, and said: ‘Where is your camera? Why aren’t you taking photos of this? This is lunacy!’

  I stared at him, not sure what he was talking about.

  ‘You’re getting too used to all this. This is not normal. This is insane! Take photos of it!’

  He was right. I was trying so hard to fit in and be a ‘bushie’ that I wasn’t seeing things objectively anymore. If the job required a total disregard for personal safety, and extreme physical discomfort, then that was how it was supposed to be, it seemed. Mind you, there usually wasn’t another way to do it anyway.

  Praise for Outback Heart

  ‘Beautifully written, with a flow that takes hold and never lets go … One of the biographies of the year.’

  Australian Women’s Weekly