Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  ‘After Iain was killed, Grandma put on a couple of fellers and managed Verbena herself till my dad was old enough to pitch in and help her. They worked the place together, dad doing the manager’s job, for more than thirty years. When things was quiet at home dad would get a plant together with them gun Murri ringers from around Mount Coolon and he’d go out mustering that Ranna Creek country and them other big stations over in that Broken River country. Them Bigges would hold off mustering till they could get dad. He’d bring their cattle in nice and easy. Scrubber bulls and wild cattle all mixed in with the quiet stock. That’s the way he did it. Tail them along real gentle for a couple of days before camping them at the yards. There was never no rip tear and bust about dad’s way of doing things. Them station owners liked to see that. The old feller wasn’t doing it for them. He was just doing things that way because that’s the way he did things. The best way he could. And never said nothing about it to nobody. Me and Dougald knew what he thought and we was never invited to discuss it with him. And that’s what he done till they lost the place. Horses and cattle. That was what my dad knew his entire life.

  ‘He never had a woman again after mum died and he never talked about her to us kids. I don’t believe he ever stopped loving our mother. My sister Rose was closer to him than the rest of us, and I think that was because she looked like our mother. Rose would take him by the arm them summer evenings at Verbena and walk him out past the garden down to Grandma’s tamarind tree and they’d stand there admiring the view and saying good evening to the strays camped along the waterhole. When Rose got married and moved down south to Chinchilla dad missed her.’

  Bo paused and relit his cigarette. ‘Grandma never seen much of her sister May till May was widowed in seventy-two. Jude Horrie, May’s son, he come back into the district for his old man’s funeral and he talked his mother into selling her share of Verbena so he could buy himself and his woman a motel down there on the highway outside Bowen. Grandma couldn’t afford to pay May outright for her share of Verbena so she offered to pay her her portion on a yearly instalment basis. That wouldn’t do for Jude Horrie. He started calling himself Jude Rennie, taking his mother’s maiden name so it would make him more one of the family and related to Iain Rennie. He come out to Verbena one morning with a real estate agent from Collinsville and fronted Grandma with an agreement of sale signed by May. That agent was an old-timer by the name of Bill Stirling, tall whippy feller, all bent up like an old brigalow stick he was, and he’s still living there in Collinsville, he must be ninety. He told Grandma the place had been sold for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and she was required to sign the agreement if she wanted to collect her share of the sale price. Grandma hunted them off the place.

  ‘Me and Dougald was up in the Gulf country in them years, breaking horses for those big stations along the Leichhardt River, Augustus Downs and Nardoo and them places, and we never knew nothing about any of this till a couple of years later when we come home and found Grandma and dad gone and the strays all cleared out from the waterhole. The new people was living in a poor looking ripple-iron homestead they built on the flat the wrong side of Verbena Creek. They didn’t want to know me and Dougald. We wasn’t even invited in for a drink of tea. I think they believed they was now old-time pastoralists. We told them they could expect Verbena Creek to flood through their house in a wet year.

  ‘When the agent come out to see Grandma with Jude Horrie that day dad was away chasing wild cattle over in the bendee scrubs of Why Not. Well, Grandma never give the matter another thought till a month or two later she received a solicitor’s order through the mail requiring her to vacate Verbena. The order claimed the Verbena title was now legally held in the names of Ben and Esmé Southey, a farming couple from down the coast there near Carmila. These Southeys never knew the first thing about running a herd of beef cattle in them old windbreak scrubs. They required occupation of the property, however, within thirty days. There was no way of proving it, and it was only his and May’s word against Grandma’s, but it seems Jude Horrie had forged Grandma’s signature on that agreement of sale. And May stuck by him and swore on a affidavit it was her sister’s signature. I think that hurt Grandma more than anything. Her own sister going against her in that way. Jude and May said Grandma changed her mind after the deal was done. They claimed she was not a person whose word could be relied upon, and was only looking to keep the whole property to herself and deny her sister and nephew their rightful share. Which everyone in the district knew was not true and that Grandma had paid May her share of the cheque for the steers all those years and May never doing a tap to earn it. But no one was going to stand up and swear to any of this on Grandma’s behalf. They seen it was one of them family disputes that are happening all the time and they didn’t want no part in it in case they come out on the wrong side. The sale and transfer of the property had gone through anyway, title searches and all, and everything looked legal and straightforward. I guess people must have decided Grandma Rennie’s time was up and that she’d had a pretty good run for an old Jangga woman from the Suttor country.

  ‘When Grandma went and seen a solicitor in Mackay about it he advised her to take her share of the sale price and count herself lucky she was getting anything at all. He pointed out that according to the Protection Act she’d never been legally entitled to have her name on any title deeds to freehold country anyway, or even for that matter to have had a legal marriage to Iain Rennie, as the Act prohibited Murris from holding title to freehold property and from marrying into the white community. The solicitor advised her the less said about the matter the better for her, unless she wanted to stir up a whole nest of claims and counter-claims that would most likely tie up the property in expensive litigation for years to come. He said it was only having Jude Rennie’s name on the document of sale that made the deal look anywhere near legal, as Jude was to all appearances a white man and had a claim to being the grandson of Iain Rennie if he wanted to go into the courts and insist upon it. Grandma and dad always had a pretty good idea about the Protection Act, but it was never something that had bothered them out there around Mount Coolon where they was well known and respected since Iain Rennie’s day. Now they seen they was vulnerable to that business and there was nothing to be done.

  ‘Them Southeys come onto Verbena with the sergeant of police and two constables from Mount Coolon. Ben Southey give dad and Grandma a half hour to pack themselves up and clear out. Which was a mistake for him. If he and his wife had come onto the place nice and easy, and showing a bit of respect, Grandma would have called them into the kitchen and give them a drink of tea and showed them one or two things that could have turned out useful to them. Like not building their new house on the flood side of the creek for one thing. They was only people after all. And she knew the land would always be there waiting for her to come back to one day. Nothing was gonna change that. But the way they hustled her off, as if she was some kind of criminal in her own home, well that got Grandma’s back up. She laid an old Murri curse on them so they could never prosper on her land. Which turned out to be true. Though there’s plenty of people around Mount Coolon, including your old dad, who could see the Southeys wasn’t gonna prosper in that country even without an old Murri curse on them. But then no one since them ever prospered there neither. So that’s something. Grandma spat on the ground at the feet of Ben Southey and she walked away with nothing. I’m not leaving anything behind, she told them. My grandson’s coming back here one day and you won’t be here to see him. She told them that despite their names on the title deeds the land of the Verbena Creek country could not leave her or her ancestors or their descendants and those they favoured, but was with them for all of time and was not a matter of legal documents. You may occupy my home by this fraud, she told them, because you have the sergeant and his constables standing over there to back you up. But you will come to see in time that this occupation of yours is nothing more than a shifting shadow over the land and has nothing
enduring in it. The land will be here unchanged when you are gone again, she told them, and you know that in your hearts. Her descendants, she said, would reoccupy her family’s country by a means the Southeys possessed no power to prevail against. You will have your day here, she said to them, but because the land will not take care of you it is to be a short and bitter day for you. So you had better make of it what you can while it endures. Them Southeys was all bravado and bluff that morning and laughed at her. But secretly they knew in their hearts that what Grandma said to them was true, because she had said it in a calm voice. And because of that they feared her, seeing that she must have an assurance of truth in her mind to make her so calm at this moment of being turned out of her home. She told me she seen their fear that morning when she touched on their uncertainty about what they was doing out there in her country so far from their own home. And that’s where the old curse lodged in them, in their uncertainty, where they was most vulnerable to its hook. Her curse clung to them in that place where they couldn’t reach, like a grass-tick clinging to a wild bull’s arse, and it grew and prospered there and irritated them until it sucked the life out of their resolve. They never shook it off. It’s what finished them in the end, as sure as a bullet in the brain would have finished them, but slower.’

  Bo fell silent, gazing out the window at the streetlight, the sky in the west now palest citron.

  ‘The most peculiar thing at the time was it looked like my dad lost his will. When Ben Southey give them a half hour to clear off, dad went into the house and changed into his town clothes. He come out wearing his suit and tie and he walked. Never said nothing to them Southeys nor to Grandma and he never looked back at the old place. Just kept going down the road towards Mount Coolon, the way Grandma told it.’

  Bo fell silent again, thinking about the scene he had not witnessed himself, his father that day, dressed in an unaccustomed suit and tie, walking down the dirt road away from the homestead.

  ‘Grandma said they all just stood there watching dad and wondering what he was gonna do. The strays coming up out of the creek and looking on. But she knew what he was gonna do. Dad didn’t have to say nothing to Grandma for her to know what he was gonna do. They both knew the story of Verbena wasn’t done yet. Them Southeys and the sergeant and constables they’d brought with them, all watched dad going down the road till he was out of sight. Then the sergeant turned to Grandma and asked her what she reckoned Coll Rennie was gonna do. You just seen him do it, she told them. He never looked back and he’s not gonna look back, not at you nor at the old place. You don’t need to ask me. You just seen it yourselves. Well, people was surprised that Coll Rennie never made a fight of it. He never got on a horse again. That was the most peculiar thing of all at the time. That Coll Rennie could just turn his back on the old place and on them ponies he’d bred up over the years. He finished up living in an old caravan on that high bank of Nebo Creek. The van belonged to a Irish feller by the name of Sam Craven used to do a bit of mustering with dad and them Mount Coolon Murris one time. And that’s where dad died and where he’s buried. In the Nebo cemetery beside my mother. Dad wasn’t much over fifty at the time. These days people would say he was a young man. It looked like he took one king hit and went down and never got up again. That’s what people said. And that’s how he was judged in the end. But they was wrong about him. Though I didn’t know that at the time and when I found out what he’d done I was as puzzled as everyone else was. It didn’t seem like the dad I knew to fold up and lie down.

  ‘After me and Dougald got back from the Gulf country I went down to Nebo and seen him. It was raining. We sat in that leaky old caravan of his and had a drink of tea and we smoked a couple of cigarettes and I don’t believe either of us said more than a dozen words to the other. If Rose or mum had still been around, well maybe he would have opened up to them. I don’t know. Maybe not too. Maybe he would have acted different if he’d of still had mum taking care of him. Except for being a fine bushman and the best horseman I ever knew, the old man was a closed book to me. We shook hands when I got up to go that day and I never saw him alive again. I think he’d decided I didn’t need him any more.

  ‘We’d done all we was ever gonna do together when I was a young feller and he was teaching us boys about horses and cattle and how to behave in the bush. And that was nearly all hand-signals from him and a look here and there and us watching the way he was doing it and trying to do it just the easy way he did it. Never much in the way of words. He never valued language. Didn’t need a lot of it to get by on. Like all them old bushmen, dad’s was a language of signs and silence mostly. He did his work as if it was something natural and was already in him when he was born. But I suppose he’d had to learn it just the way we did. Though he never had his own dad to show him. Iain Rennie was killed when dad was only a child. So I don’t know where he got it from but he got it from somewhere. And that’s the way it was. I don’t ever remember dad telling us kids we was doing it right if we was doing a thing right or that we was doing it wrong if we was doing it wrong. He just give us a bit of a look and we knew if we’d got it right or wrong. There wasn’t no consequences with dad of you getting a thing right or wrong, except in yourself and the way you felt about what you was doing. That was the only consequence and it was the one we all lived by. Not the strap. He never hit us. He left us kids to judge ourselves. It didn’t matter if you was his own kid or someone else’s kid. Like Grandma, he never made no distinctions. You was a kid and you needed room to learn in and he give you all the room you needed. We was lucky to have him.’

  Bo reached to the sidetable for his packet of Drum. ‘That was Coll Rennie. Admired in life and misunderstood in death. My dad. I wish I could have been even half like him.’ He rolled a smoke.

  Annabelle watching him, the room faintly lit by the streetlight across the road. The sky black and glittering with stars. She was thinking how sheltered her own life had been. She had known almost nothing of the real lives of their neighbours down the road at Verbena. She was remembering her father telling them around the dinner table of the fights at Verbena and the strays along the creek. They had all laughed to think of such a place and had thought it peculiar and different. The old Jangga woman she had never met, Grandma Rennie. Bo was speaking of another reality. It had all seemed so simple to her as a child, the complexity of their lives unnoticed by her.

  Mount Coolon

  IT WAS JUST BREAKING DAY NEXT MORNING WHEN BO BACKED THE Pajero down the sideway and turned into Zamia Street, a cold green thinness of high cloud veiling the heights of the escarpment to the west. They had slept the night together in her parents’ bed. The clink of a cup on its saucer waking her in the dark, Bo already dressed, leaning and touching her shoulder. ‘Time to go, my love.’ They breakfasted in the kitchen, Mr White watching them. Bo stood by the Pajero rolling a smoke and watching her put the cylindrical stone in the blue grocery box. He didn’t ask her what she had in mind and they drove over to South Townsville along the silent streets. Bo pulled up outside a fibro-cement house, Arner’s white truck parked in the sideway. A light on in the house. Bo sounded the horn and a moment later Arner came out of the house. He raised his hand in greeting and climbed into the cabin of his truck.

  They turned onto the narrow two-lane highway, heading south along the coast in the dawnlight towards Bowen. Roadkilled wallabies lining the verges. Arner’s white truck dogging them a hundred metres back. Bo drove fast, an edge of impatience in him, chewing the dead butt of his cigarette. Annabelle was remembering their first meeting at the Burranbah coal lease. This Queensland ringer seeming to know something of her that day that she scarcely knew herself. The confident intimacy in his voice: ‘Oh we met all right, Annabellebeck.’ Offering her a memory of herself that he had cherished, keeping it close for this moment: she and he playing together as infants in the waterhole by the redcliff on summer picnics, her mother in those days Grandma Rennie’s friend, the two women intimate and confiding in each other
’s gentle company. An image to be treasured by her, the innocence of their shared infancy making the connection real. She looked across at him.

  He took one hand from the wheel and put it in hers. ‘You look good in them faded dungarees, Annabellebeck.’

  ‘I feel good in them, Bo Rennie.’ She squeezed his hand.

  After two hours driving south they turned off the highway beyond Merinda and climbed away from the coast, the bitumen behind them, heading west now into the Clarke Ranges along the graded dirt of the Bowen Developmental Road. Bo’s impatience seemed to leave him once the coast was behind him and they were travelling the sparse open country of the ranges. He settled back and handed her his packet of Drum. They saw no other vehicles before they reached the old mining town of Collinsville, the only settlement of any substance along the road west. Yellow dust whirling and eddying along the deserted mainstreet. Bo slowed the Pajero and pointed to a sagging weatherboard fronting the road. ‘Old Bill Stirling lives there. He was the land agent put that crooked deal through for May and Jude Horrie. We’ll drop in and pay him a visit on the way back. A bottle of that OP rum will soon light up his memory for him.’

  A half hour later they descended into a fold in the ranges and Bo pulled off the road at the Bowen River. He lit a fire on the smoothworn riverstones in the lee of a grassy bank and set the smoke-blackened billy to boil. Annabelle went down to the water and washed her face and hands. There was a cold wind, like nothing on the coast. The tall casuarinas along the riverbank sighing and swaying. Arner sitting on the grassy bank watching Bo grilling the sausages and steaks for lunch. When she returned from the river Annabelle stood at the tailgate of the Pajero buttering slices of bread. She came over to the fire with the tin plate of bread and the tomato sauce and stood watching the meat cooking, the wind whipping the fragrant smoke into her face. Bo leaning and turning the meat with a pair of crocodile tongs, his free hand going out, motioning up to the head of the valley. ‘This water comes down from that Ranna Creek. Them sweet springs up in that Furious country, behind Mathew’s people’s place. She’s good water.’