by Miller, Alex
It was ten or eleven years later when I buried Dad up there beside Mum and alongside Ben’s dad, who died of lung cancer. Dad had an accident off his horse and took a while to go. I was home with him holding his hand the evening he went. He was in pain and I believe he was not sorry to leave it behind. The last words he said to me was, I love you, son. It was good to hear that from him and I have cherished them words ever since, hearing him say them often in my mind when I have struck a patch of trouble. My dad believed in me and in my ability out there in the scrubs and nothing made me prouder than to have that belief and trust from him, and to know it in myself. He was the finest horseman I ever knew. I seen him step into a yard with a wild horse and him and that horse working partners together by the end of that same day, and nothing said about it. That is just how it was with him and horses. No one never made nothing of it. He never raised his voice to an animal, nor his whip. He had it from my grandfather, who raised him in the bendee and the brigalow scrubs in the steady way they had in them days. Hard men they were, but with a belief and a grace in them and in their actions that we do not see in men now. It has been forgotten. I do not know why. I had no way of contacting Charley for our dad’s funeral but I said a prayer for him beside the grave so my older brother would not be left out of it. There was a loneliness in me for my mother, knowing Charley was not there. I cannot explain it. That was the way of our family and there is no more to be said of it.
My mother died alone without her sons or her husband at her side, but I do not think the people of Mount Hay thought that circumstance unusual in them days. There was no town further west after Mount Hay, just them two big cattle runs, the Stanbys’ Assumption Downs, and they was English people, and that family out at Preference whose name I never could remember, it was Irish. But no actual town till you crossed the border into the Territory. But I never went that far west and I never heard of no town over the border except what they used to call the Wheel. I am not sure if the Wheel is in the Territory or is still in the state of Queensland. Like I said, I never been out there and I have no picture of the Wheel in my head but only the name. Mount Hay was the end of the line then and still is as far as I know that country.
I never missed visiting my mother’s grave on the anniversary of her death except if we was out in the camps. But I never seen Dad go up there to the cemetery. I think he did not wish to be reminded his wife was dead. It was a sad fact that had come into his life and he could forget it when we was out in the camps. My mother never had been out in the camps with him and it was normal to be without her. He only seen her when we come back into town. It was 1946 or 47 when Dad died. I know the facts but I am not reliable around dates and numbers, so do not hold me to the year exactly. Things changed for me at that time. By then I was twenty years of age, I suppose, and Daniel Collins come out of the army, and that is when this trouble that I am giving an account of here started. With Dad gone and Ben’s dad already dead the old days was over for us and I needed to look around and find a new way for myself to make a living. The stations would have been happy to put me on and I might have stuck with the cattle work but the job with the new constable come up just then and I thought I would give it a go just for a short time. I did not expect things to work out the way they did.
. . .
Daniel Collins had served as a volunteer with the Australian forces in New Guinea during the war and after he come out he joined the Queensland Police Service. When we got Daniel as the new constable at Mount Hay his older girl, Irie, was twelve years of age, or around that, and the younger was maybe nine or ten. I was not sure at the time of their ages. Esme and Daniel soon got close again after the war, which was not how it worked out for every man who come back. Esme was a determined woman and was firm in her high principles. The police in Brisbane, where Daniel done his induction, told him he could apply for the bush but he had to be a horseman. He told them he knew something about horses, but I do not think Daniel Collins ever knew too much about horses. He applied for the constable job out at Mount Hay which come vacant when old George Wilson finally give it away. George was the constable at Mount Hay for around thirty years, and if trouble ever happened in George’s time he always give it a bit of clearance to sort itself out before stepping in. Which usually turned out he had no cause to step in too hard in any case as things had more or less worked themselves out by the time he roused himself. George believed in something he called a natural peace. Which some people said was bone laziness by another name. But to my way of thinking there was a wisdom in George Wilson’s method of policing our town. The gold mining was pretty well played out by that time and there was only a handful of the old hopefuls left fossicking the known seams and mullock heaps, and the stockmen from them big stations seldom come into town more than once or twice in a year and kicked up a bit of a party. George only ever had two murders in his whole time as the Mount Hay constable and there was never a robbery I ever heard of. Cattle duffing was a usual pastime with some of the young fellers on the stations but it never got too serious and everyone knew who was doing it and it was soon put a stop to. Mount Hay was not a troubled town like they say the Isa was. Though I have never been to the Isa and that is only hearsay from me and cannot be trusted for the facts.
Dad dying and George Wilson retiring and the war ending all happened around the same time and the way I had been living out in the camps most of the year come to an end. I did not think too much about applying for the constable’s offsider job but just went over and asked Daniel about giving the job to me and we shook hands and he agreed to take me on. George Wilson never had no offsider but Daniel Collins announced at the pub that he was entitled to put one on. We all seen Daniel’s intention was to do the job by the book. Which was the first notice we had of the changes. If I had known what was going to happen between Ben and Daniel I would have thought more about it and kept out of the way. But I just seen it as a job at the time, which I was in need of.
The police in Brisbane laughed at Daniel and told him to be careful not to die of boredom out there in the ranges, which they called the wilderness. But Daniel was interested in all kinds of things and not just in policing so he said he would risk getting bored. He believed he had missed out on some of his best years fighting in the war and wanted to make up for lost time. At least that is what he told me. It was an adventure for him and his family to go out there to Mount Hay and I do not think they was ever intending to spend more than a couple of years in the ranges at the outside, but seen it as something they could look back on and talk about when they was back in the city again. Daniel and Esme seen it as a challenge to improve things in Mount Hay. But they would have done better to hold off a while like George Wilson, till they got a feel for the way things was done. But that was not their way.
To people like the Collins, Mount Hay was what they called the outback, but to us it was just Mount Hay. If they ever heard of it people in Mount Hay did not know where the outback was, but Daniel and Esme seemed to be sure of knowing they was already in it, which was the cause of a good deal of amusement in the bar of Chiller Swales’ hotel. The way I saw it was that Daniel and Esme never thought too much about how it was going to be for them coming in to police a town like Mount Hay from outside the way they did. They surely thought we was a bunch of country hicks and they knew better than we did how to do things and did not think they had nothing to learn. But they had never been out in country like the ranges before and was coastal people. In the ranges everyone knows everyone else for hundreds of miles around. And we always knew if there was a stranger around and would have him pinpointed exactly. Strangers was rare. Old George had grown up in the ranges and knew the way things was done. Daniel knew other things. He had books on the geology of the inland and the local people and history and he was proposing to do some reading of those books he brought with him and become an expert on us.
. . .
Mount Hay main street was just the police office and house at the back, and beside it on both
sides there was empty blocks of land with only the stumps of old houses left on them. Down the road towards the west and on the opposite side from the police office was Hoy’s milk bar and grocery store, which was also the postal office. There was a couple of unoccupied shops, both with their front windows broken in and sheets of ripple iron nailed over them, and then come Chiller Swales’ hotel. The picture theatre down the road by the corner before you head out west had been burned down some years before and never got rebuilt. There was the tennis courts, which had not been used since I was a child and was all overgrown with rattlepod, and then the public hall that was sliding off its stumps, its timbers pretty much eaten out by white ants. The only fuel pump in town was at the side of Hoy’s place. That was about it. Except for the school, a hundred yards further along than the burned picture theatre. I do not know why they put the school so far away, but maybe they thought the town would grow out to meet it. But it never did. The kids from the outlying stations come in as well as the town kids. They was like two tribes and was always fighting. It was black kids and white kids at the school in them days but that changed later when the government brought in new ideas. People was generally scattered about the township in timber and fibro cement houses. Like Mum and Dad’s old place. When someone died or left town their place usually stayed empty. There was a few of them abandoned houses around. I rode past our old place one day and seen some town boys had kicked in the fibro panels and shot out most of the windows. Which was usually what happened when a house was left empty. I thought of burning it, but I did not do that and rode on. I suppose it is still there to this day, what is left of the old place.
There was no real centre to Mount Hay like there had once been. Goats come along the street and eat everything. The dogs got sick of chasing them off and just lay in the shade with their head on their paws and give a tired kind of woof if the goats got too close to them. The mail delivery truck went to the coast twice a week and brought in stores and drums of fuel for the town and the outlying people. If you was willing to leave people alone to get on with whatever they was doing, which was what George Wilson always done, then I would say Mount Hay was not a hard town to police.
After Dad passed away and I started as Daniel’s offsider, Esme made me welcome and had me eating with her and Daniel and the girls in the kitchen of the police house. I did not camp in the house with them, but in the fibro two-man quarters at the back of the police block. Which suited me as it was next to the horse paddock and the feed shed, where I spent a good deal of my time. After I started I did not wait to be told by Daniel nothing of what needed to be done but put shoes on the police horses and took care of them without saying nothing to him. Which was the way we always worked when Dad and Ben’s dad were alive. If we seen something needed doing we done it and no one said nothing about it. There was two horses belonging to the police and my two, so I was not kept real busy. Dad’s old packhorse, Beau, was the boss of all the horses as soon as I put him in the paddock. He nearly had them two police horses through the fence in their panic. Beau and my mare Mother was close as brother and sister and them police horses could not get near Mother without Beau driving them. It took them all a week or two to sort themselves out and know where they stood with each other. They never become close friends but they learned to live with each other without going through the fences.
By then I had forgot the little of reading and writing I’d picked up in that school we had in Mount Hay in them days, and being out in the camps with Dad since I was ten my mother never did get the chance to teach me nothing, even though she would have liked to. It was Daniel and Esme’s older girl, Irie, that taught me to read and write properly, or I would not be writing this account of the trouble that come on us now. The young one, Miriam, mocked me for not knowing my schoolwork but Irie never did, she just set to and helped me learn. Irie had brown hair and very pale skin like her dad. If she went out in the sun without her hat she burned to red in no time. She was gentle and respectful when instructing me but there was a steel spring in that girl that would unwind in a flash like a whip when she was pushed. She did not accept advice or criticism from her mother Esme or from Daniel without backing up against them. And she kept to her own thoughts. I seen that at once and admired her for it. I was very soon more than half in love with her though she was yet but a child. I liked the independent way she carried herself and I seen she was soon going to be the kind of woman my mother and father would have had a high opinion of. I wish they had known her. If Charley had been more like her when I was a kid I would have had an older brother as a friend to look out for me and maybe I would not have got so close to Ben as I did. But Charley was always a loner. I never knew what his thoughts was or where he went when he headed off on his own. And I never wanted to be like him. Him and Dad never hit it off and Dad was always rounding on him for something. Charley was not interested in stock work and had no admiration for our dad and his ways. He looked upon our father with some fear and could not be open with him about his thoughts. Dad could not stand that. My mother used to say our Charley was born different, and she would shake her head and say there was no use trying to make him change. Charley is himself, she said and she told Dad he should be content with that. But Dad could not be content in this way about his older son and always remained disappointed in Charley, carrying an anger against him. He was harder on Charley than he ever was on me and I seen how Charley resented that and could not wait for the day when he was grown enough to leave Mount Hay and get out on his own. Which is what he did. I never heard Dad speak of him after that, but my mother used to look up from what she was doing some evenings and say to no one in particular, I wonder where our Charley is now? We did not hear from him. I have wondered if he resented me for being my mother’s favourite. And that has given me feelings of regret that I did not try to help him when the chance was there. I will not look to excuse myself now.
Daniel encouraged me to read them books he had on geology and history but I was not a good enough reader in them days to make sense of them. At first he was always wanting to talk with me about things in Mount Hay and what I thought of this or that family. He come down to the yards where I was tending to the horses and asked me about the old days and my father and all that, but I was never much of a talker. I pretended to him that what he said was interesting to me because I could see he wanted me to enjoy his company, but I never knew what he was talking about most of the time. My dad would have took one look at Daniel Collins and he would have walked away and not looked back. Thinking of the way Dad would have seen him I sometimes had the flicker of what you might call contempt in myself for Daniel, but it was something I rebuked myself for as I only knew him to be a good man and never deserving of anyone’s harsh judgment. Because he and Esme was from the coast did not make them bad people, just different. I remember a photo in one of them books of his. It was of a man standing next to an anthill holding a long stick upright in his hand. I do not know if the photo was to show how tall the anthill was or how tall the man was or how long the stick was, or maybe all three. But I remember looking at that picture for some time and wondering about it. And I still have a good memory of it today. The man was without a hat, which was unusual then and may be why I remember that picture. I do not know who the man was. It did not say and I did not ask. Who he was did not seem like something I would ever need to know.
We never asked too many questions about things we did not want to know about. And even with things we wanted to know about we waited to find out and kept our questions to ourselves and mostly they got answered by events. But Daniel was not like us in that and was always asking questions. He stood out from the people of the ranges and you seen he would never be one of us. If me and him was meeting with Chiller at the pub or with Allan Hoy or his missus at the store, Daniel would be asking them about this and that, how old was their kids and how long had they been there and where did they live before they come to Mount Hay. And I seen how uneasy his questions was making everyone.
There were times I found it hard to listen to him. But that was his habit of open curiosity, and it come to stand between him and a good many of the people in Mount Hay, me included, though I would say I liked him well enough in a general way. Others come straight out and said he was a damn fool and would not last long and they made sure to avoid him if they seen him coming. If I did not know the true answers to his questions, I made up answers out of my head to please him and he never seemed to mind me doing that and I do not know if he ever noticed I was doing it, though I think Esme did as she give me a bit of a look if I come up with some answer she thought was just too fancy. Daniel wrote my answers in the notebook he always kept in the breast pocket of his police shirt, as if he thought writing down my answers was making them more true than they was. I have very little memory of the things I told him. I would say whatever come to me at the moment. Harmless lies mostly, I suppose. It pleased me to see him listening to whatever I said, nodding his head and fingering his pencil, ready to place my words in his record, just like he thought I was the expert on Mount Hay.
Esme and me had some understanding of this that we did not share with Daniel and we did not even share it openly with each other, but it was just there between us by signs. Because a thing is not in the open does not mean it is not there. I was young and so was she. I respected her and at first I liked her, but I feared too what she might bring about with her high principles and I was not mistaken in that fear, as we shall see. But you cannot tell another person how to change their ways and I did not try to tell Daniel’s wife how she might change herself to suit Mount Hay instead of trying to change Mount Hay to suit herself. Which I knew she would never succeed in. The people of Mount Hay was who they was and that was that. People of the ranges. And they mostly despised the people of the coast and laughed at them and their peculiar way of going on.