How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  He was always interfering in work around the place, asking what we were doing or watching from his place where he often stood on the verandah. Although he let stuff arrive on the truck without commenting I was smart enough to know that Charles and the truck was not a way of escape. I didn’t even dare ask Charles to take a message out for me. But it was like the barbecue was invisible. It became a sort of shrine, a special place for us all. This massive brick and metal barbecue with stove and sink and statue was never going anywhere yet it was our symbol of freedom. Of escape.

  To a casual observer the station seemed to be running well and that was exactly as Palmenter wanted it. We all knew, to varying degrees, what was going on. Although Simms noticed very little about anything and Cookie rarely knew what day it was, I am sure we were all aware that the station was a front for smuggling people into the country. Charles must have known and approved because at each import he collected and returned the vans to us. Exactly how much of it Palmenter owned or organised directly I didn’t know, but he had something to do with everything, of that I was sure. When the boats reached the coast, the chopper, under cover of the muster going on, flew into the station where the people were put up in the dongas for a few days. This got them away from the coast and out of the areas where authorities might be looking for them. Later on we used this same basic system but I improved it quite a bit.

  They were divided into groups of three, or four, maybe five for one of the bigger vans, and sent south to either Melbourne or Sydney. Only one van would leave in a day, and we gave them each a different route. We had several routes marked out on maps. When they got to the city, the vans were returned to the station ready for the next import. I suspected Palmenter had eyes and ears all along the way, tracking their progress and reporting any problems, and people in the city ready to take back the vans as they arrived.

  Although I was doing the bookwork I had little idea about the import side of things. That was all handled by Palmenter and it was all done in cash, but I did discover that the station was losing money and that Palmenter was feeding just enough cash back in to keep it afloat. At least, that’s what I thought was happening. One time, I added up the amount of musters and the number of cattle supposedly shipped out and sold. I joked with Spanner.

  ‘Must be something in the grass out there, ’cause they sure are fertile cattle.’

  Spanner was the only person I could talk to. He was my friend but I didn’t want to come right out and say what I suspected. I wanted to see if Spanner would volunteer anything, how much he knew or was prepared to divulge to me.

  ‘Best if you didn’t notice that one, I think,’ was what he said.

  Earlier on, before Arif, before leaving became so urgent, I was out on a bore run and I noticed the road out along the east boundary was well used. At the time I idly thought it must lead somewhere. Later I calculated that if I drove carefully on my runs I might siphon off some small amounts of fuel, store it in containers some place, and I could leave the station via this back way without Palmenter knowing. So I had followed the road for a way and was surprised when I came back to the cattle yards: this wide road did a big circuit around the property and came right back to where it started. Except for a few very sandy 4WD tracks, the only way onto and off the station was via the homestead so the purpose of this well-formed loop of road was a bit of a mystery.

  Sometimes Arif was only a memory and I could spend content afternoons with Spanner looking through his fishing magazines. Life was as near to normal as it could be. But other times we would sit together and I’d leaf through the magazines angered at how old they were, that Spanner could be entertained by something he had seen or read thousands of times. Or, worse, I’d have something I wanted to know or understand and I would struggle with how to broach the subject.

  It was like that one day when I had been doing some accounts and suddenly it dawned on me. Close to the time of each muster there was a cash deposit, barely enough to keep the place solvent. There was no other income and the amounts varied considerably. I didn’t think cattle prices fluctuated that much and I doubted buyers paid cash. Plus, we were running a muster every month now and there simply couldn’t be that many cattle or I’d have seen them while out on the bore runs. The cattle were mustered up, loaded on trucks, driven around the property, then unloaded again.

  ‘It’s all a front, isn’t it, to cover the choppers coming and going? The noise and dust and traffic. It hides what he’s really doing.’

  ‘Best if you don’t go there,’ Spanner said.

  Obviously the truck drivers knew what was going on. Probably the whole muster crew did too. Anyone who knew anything about how to run a cattle station would know that you couldn’t run a muster every month. Perhaps they all started out like me, innocent, doing odd jobs and legitimate business, slowly being drip-fed more about the real nature of it and by acceptance becoming complicit, or being threatened and being too weak to act, slowly in deeper until too far gone to get out. Perhaps that is how they all got involved.

  Must be that everyone was in on it at some level. The cops, too. The cops had come to tell Palmenter about the five who had perished out on the south track and I’d seen them take money and steaks from him. And some of Cookie’s dope.

  The imports paid thousands of dollars each and there were twenty or thirty each month. This was more than a few dollars earned as a bus stop along a people-smuggling route, it was a big business, a hundred grand or more a month, and we were the central point. Even if Palmenter himself was not the king pin, what happened at Palmenter Station was integral to the whole operation and now that I was doing the accounts I was becoming integral too. I had helped to bury bodies and I had witnessed a murder and I felt the real threat that if I tried to leave I would end in the pit next to Arif. I had to get away. Far away. I couldn’t trust any of them, not even Spanner who had been here with Palmenter from the beginning and was warning me, gently, to back off.

  It was about then that I decided that I had to leave no matter what. Palmenter was slowly giving me more office work to do and Simms was being sent on more of the bore runs. I realised that eventually I would not be sent on any bore runs so I’d have to act soon. I figured if I drove to the south boundary along the cattle road I’d only have to cross two creeks and some dune country to make one of the old desert tracks. They would be soft sand, but should be possible if I let the tyres down. Once I got to the main road I would drive slowly until a roadhouse where I would pump them up again. If I did it on a bore run I would be in Sydney by the time they noticed I was gone. I siphoned off small amounts of fuel whenever I could. It would have been easy to bleed diesel from the generator tank, or from the dozer or grader, but the vans were petrol so I had to take a little each time I went out on the bore run. If I drove very carefully I could eke out the ration I was given, siphon off a few litres each time.

  I started a collection of two-litre milk containers that were easy to hide each time I did a rubbish run. I hid the full ones under the laundry where no one would ever look. Although Spanner was my friend I didn’t tell him. When I left I’d take one of the vans and he’d work it out. I told Cookie, saying I was heading off on a two-week bore run and needed extra food. I probably shouldn’t have done that.

  I was nearly ready to go when Palmenter came to me.

  ‘Come for a drive,’ he said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  He drove me in one of the vans towards the main road and I wondered what we were going to see. He was so casual and disarming that I didn’t suspect a thing until about halfway there.

  ‘So you wanna leave, Son. Wish you’d told me. We could have talked about this.’

  I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. I nearly panicked. If he had discovered my plan or found my secret fuel stash I would be about to join Arif. But of course he knew I wanted to leave. When I first asked he had said, ‘Okay, but work out to the end of the month.’ By the end of the month, another muster: ‘Not while the mu
ster is on, Son, don’t leave us in the lurch.’ There was always a reason to stay a little longer and he either preyed on my sense of responsibility – ‘You did sign on for the year, Son, and we’ve spent a lot of effort getting you up to speed, to be useful round here.’ – or he’d offer some incentive.

  ‘Son, if you stay the six months, that gets you to the bonus, well worth it, Son. I know you’re only up here for the cash so it would be silly to pass up the chance of the bonus.’ He was sort of right, and then there was the wet, another muster, another year gone by.

  ‘I look after my people, but if they don’t want, well, what can you do. You just gotta let them go.’

  Had he found the stuff? I was trying to form words, wondering whether to deny that I had planned to leave without telling him, but he didn’t seem to want me to talk and I think he was saying something but I couldn’t hear anything but the rush of blood in my ears. We were approaching the road and beyond that the track up to the pit and the rifle was sitting there on the dash as it always was and perhaps as we slowed for the corner I could grab the gun and run. I tried to still my breathing, calm my heartbeat.

  I was much younger than him. I could move a whole lot faster. If I jumped as we turned to the right I could roll with the momentum and grab the gun as I went. I’d be out before he moved. I moved my hand onto the door handle, but instead of turning he stopped at the road, left the engine running and sat looking straight ahead.

  ‘Out ya get. Off you go, don’t come back until you’re ready to be on the team.’

  Dumbly, numb, and without grabbing the gun I got out. He wouldn’t do it here on the road, but just in case, I stood back a bit, behind the door pillar where I could see him but he would have to turn to see me. He simply drove off, away up the road as if he had dropped me at the highway to catch a bus. I watched dumbfounded as the van sped off and I hadn’t moved when it slowed, turned around, and gathered speed as it came back towards me. I felt hunted. Was he playing with me? Was he going to run me down or worse, was he going to shoot at me for some sporting fun?

  I ran. I took off into the desert as quickly as I could across the soft sand and tried to put some scrub between me and him. I heard the van continue up the road. I kept running, jogging, fearful he might come back. I ran from the road until suddenly I was on the long downhill that leads towards the pit. I would have heard the van if he’d come along that way, but even so I turned and jogged to my left, parallel to the road, until I could jog no more. I walked. I meandered, at first towards the pit where I knew that eventually someone would come when they did a rubbish run, and then away, deeper into the desert, because it might have been Palmenter who came. I collapsed near a tree and cried. I moved closer to the highway, close enough to hear any cars. I hid as best I could. It was too far for me to walk anywhere but back to the station. Perhaps a car would come.

  9

  During the day I burned in the sun. I had no hat and the tree offered little shade. I had nothing with me. No money. None of my stuff. I had no water, no food, nothing other than what I had been wearing when he said come for a drive. I spent two freezing desert nights and then walked to the station. Of course he knew and I knew that no cars would come and that the only thing for me to do was walk back to the homestead. I went straight to the water tower and gulped cool water and splashed it over my aching head and blistered skin. I saw him watching me from the homestead verandah. Bastard, I thought. I went to my room and lay down, I wanted to cry but couldn’t. I couldn’t stop shaking. The moment I began to feel just a little under control that terror would come back. Of being out in front of a loaded gun, of being unknown, alone, insignificant and invisible to the world but enormous in the great wide land full from horizon to horizon of nothing but that bullet with my name on it.

  I thought of Arif and his body out there, that there was no one to miss him, and then I thought of my family. Why hadn’t they replied to my letters? Because, stupid, he never posted them.

  Maybe my father or Simon would come looking for me. How many years would have to go by? When I left home I hadn’t given an address because all I knew was it was a place called Wingate Station. But they could find it. You can’t hide ten thousand square kilometers of land. But the name had been changed, and I had been told to ask at the roadhouse and suddenly I realised that the roadhouse must be in on it somehow.

  ‘Wingate Station?’ At the roadhouse when I asked, the manager had wandered to the door and checked out my van. Satisfied, he continued, ‘Yeah, mate. That’s Palmenter’s place now,’ and he gave me directions.

  How much was the roadhouse a part of it? Probably only enough to let Palmenter know if anyone ever came asking. He must have known the police were coming that time, that was why they waited for him as he walked casually over to their car. Maybe the roadhouse only did it to keep the lucrative avgas contract and didn’t know much else, but I felt sure if someone turned up asking for directions to Wingate Station Palmenter would get to hear about it well before any maps to Palmenter Station were handed out.

  I must have become delirious because I remember hearing my father talking to me. He told me he was driving up to find me. He was going to confront Palmenter. And then there was a fight, my father and Palmenter outside my room, and my father was being beaten, but I was at school again, caught in the classroom at lunchtime and it was not my father and Palmenter but me and Dan Taylor and Dan tripped me and I fell, and there was no Dan, I was walking, stumbling, alone in the scrub, and my father told me again he was looking for me, and in all that I realised my father was exactly like me, he would no more confront Palmenter than I would. I cried. I went to sleep crying because I was just like my father and as I cried, in my self-pity, I understood what the recruitment agent had seen. That I was the perfect candidate for this job.

  Cookie brought me something to eat later. He tapped gently at the door and came in.

  ‘Thought you might be hungry.’ He set a fresh roll with salad and meats on my dresser and waited, apologetically.

  With the fresh bread smell I was suddenly ravenous. As I ate I wondered if my fuel stash was safe. Between mouthfuls I asked.

  ‘One of your containers leaked. He smelt it. Came into the kitchen in a fury, saw the food I had packaged up for you.’ Cookie seemed to wish I had got away with it. ‘Sorry mate.’

  ‘Not your fault.’ I ate some more. ‘You know what’s going on. Can’t you leave? Why do you stay? Maybe if we all left.’

  Cookie didn’t answer right away. He took out some leaf and concentrated on rolling a joint.

  ‘Some of my finest. You probably need one of these and I’m just the person to share it with.’ He was that. Cookie the space cadet. Was he a part of it all? Was it for the drugs that he stayed or were they simply how he coped?

  ‘Spanner and I were here before he was. It was okay then. Still can be okay, y’know, if you just keep to yourself, don’t get involved in the shit. Here we got freedom you don’t get most places, wide open space, clean air, no one to hassle you. At some point you gotta give up caring about the rest of the world anyway, might as well be before you die.’ He made a little gesture of smoking the joint that he hadn’t yet lit. ‘I know, I know, I smoke too much of the ganja but when it comes down to it, what else is life? What else is there?’

  It was the longest and most coherent speech I had ever heard from him. Indeed, what else was there?

  ‘Girls,’ I suggested. ‘And travel, people, art, music, culture, restaurants.’

  ‘There is that. But what else? What is there that is important?’

  ‘That is all important.’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  He lit the joint and took a long toke then passed it to me.

  ‘Thing is I don’t disagree with any of it. Give people a chance, these people have nothing, have nowhere to go. He’s a bastard and a bully and an arsehole but, hey?’ He shrugged again.

  The dope was strong. I closed my eyes for a moment before I handed the joi
nt back to him and watched the end glow as he drew on it. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back.

  ‘If you want to leave you’ll have to be a bit clever about it. He’s totally paranoid someone is going to talk, dob him in.’

  I watched Cookie, motionless except for the subtle roll of his wrist to prevent ash falling. His eyes were still closed.

  ‘But he can’t make people stay. He can’t keep me here as a prisoner for the rest of my life. You can’t give freedom to some people if it means imprisoning others. He...’ I was about to tell Cookie about Arif, but I didn’t. ‘I feel like I am trapped here until he decides I can go.’

  ‘Walls are in your head, mate.’

  ‘Bullshit. If there are no walls, why do you smoke so much shit?’

  He considered that. He looked at the joint in his hand, thought for a while then relit it, took a long drag and held his breath. As he let it out he leaned back. ‘I’m just putting windows in the walls in my head.’

  But I knew he agreed with me. We were two prisoners discussing the outside world and the walls were a thousand kilometres of desert and scrub and land only a nomad could live in.

  ‘Don’t you think we have a duty to ourselves to always strive, to fight to escape whatever it is that holds us and that this is all the more imperative when we find ourselves in a situation we don’t agree with,’ I said, rather than asked.

  Bullshit, I thought. I had walked from the road to here, right back into the situation I didn’t agree with rather than die in the struggle to escape.