Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  Arner’s broad buttocks resting on the edge of the grassy bank, his big hands on his knees, his gaze fixed devotedly upon the hot fat wheezing and popping through the sausage skins, lighting up the red coals with small flares of yellow flame.

  Annabelle’s gaze followed the direction of Bo’s indicating hand. He might have been talking to himself, reciting his memories, his voice low and indistinct, his head turned away, a mumbled inventory of the country, checking off its principal features and the notable moments that touched upon his personal history. Connecting their journey to his past. Accounting for where they were. He stood up and eased his back. ‘The Bowen River,’ he said emphatically, the portentous conclusion of his meditation on being somewhere. ‘Don’t wait for the wind to chill that meat, you fellers. Get into it while it’s hot.’ He reached and forked a steak onto a slice of buttered bread and poured a liberal quantity of tomato sauce over it.

  They sat eating the hot grilled meat and sipping their dark sugared tea in silence, the tinkling of the water over the stones, the wind sighing in the tall sheoaks, a solitary crow observing them discreetly from a shattered bluegum on the far bank.

  Annabelle broke a long silence, ‘If the Oorana Dam gets built, how will it affect the flow in the Bowen here?’

  Bo gestured at the river, ‘She’ll be just a bit of a trickle along here.’ He tugged the last of the meat off the bone with his teeth and tossed the bone off to one side. The solitary crow lifted from its perch and rode the wind, settling on the stones with a quick two-step a metre back from the bone, eyeing them sideways. Bo said, ‘Go on then, feller. Get it!’ The crow stepped up with a sideways hop and snatched the bone off the stones. It heaved itself into the air, working its great sable wings and swinging away from them towards the far bank, the bone gripped sideways in its beak.

  After lunch Bo lay down beside the fire on his swag and put his hat over his eyes. He slept for an hour then woke and made a fresh billy of tea. Lingering by the Bowen lunchcamp, making his presence felt, easing himself back into his country. They stayed there for another hour or more, Bo drinking tea and smoking, Arner shut away in his truck, the thump of his music, almost as if they would not leave this day but might remain at this place indefinitely, until the sighing of the trees and the tinkling of the river had become the familiar sounds of home to them, and the white-eyed crow a customary guest at their table. Some sign or other, however, attracted Bo’s attention and at last he stood and stretched his limbs and said they had better be slipping along, a reluctance in his voice, almost as if he had received a quiet instruction to that effect, rousing him from his pleasant reverie.

  Only then did Annabelle realise something. She said, ‘You’ve camped at this spot before?’

  ‘Oh yes! Me and old Dougald unsaddled here a heap of times. She’s a good lunchcamp.’ He waved his hand towards a grassy clearing the other side of the road. ‘A mob of cattle will settle sweetly on that flat.’ He looked around. ‘They call this Chinaman’s Flat.’ He waved his hand, a loose indefinite gesture. ‘There’s an old Chinese prospector buried over there somewhere. I don’t know exactly where. There’s no headstone.’

  They packed their things and drove up out of the valley of the Bowen onto the high windswept upland of the Leichhardt Range, the Pajero trailing a pale dust off to one side, the gravel road spearing through the grey scrub ahead of them, the landscape flat and undeviating, punctured here and there in the blue distance by the abrupt upthrust of cone hills; the antique remnants of a volcanic age when the high plains smoked and the sky was for ever a bloodred hue. The heartland, Bo called it. The ancient stone country of the Jangga. A high cold windswept upland dividing the tropical coast from the inland, a place of mingled forms, plateaus and downs and concealed valleys, and sudden strange tenements of stone, a unique warp in the great Tasman geosyncline.

  The Pajero sped past small clearings in the scrub floored by white earth, as if these were the trodden ashes of abandoned fires, overarched by the skinny limbs of twisted turpentine trees that might have been the desiccated remains of the dwelling houses of a species long vanished from this earth. Bo pointing all the while, murmuring and indicating, his hand going out, a nervousness of anticipation in him. Annabelle catching a phrase here and there through the roadnoise, ‘That old turpentine, she’s the only timber the white ant don’t eat.’ He laughed and looked across at her. ‘They should’ve stuck some of that turpentine wood into them books of George Bigges.’ Bo going on, his voice falling below the rumble of the Pajero then rising, audible to her for a moment, a string of men’s names, his hand pointing, ‘Good old feller come down off his horse back in there. Broke his neck.’ The grey scrub a lava flow to the horizon, the Pajero rattling over the corrugations. ‘Get yourself confused real quick . . . Them watersheds head out four ways . . . I’ll show you something so you’ll never get lost up here.’ Another gesture, quick and precise. ‘The home of the springs. Plenty of good men got themselves bushed following one of them creeks around in circles looking for her.’

  They slipped across the head channel of the Suttor River. Annabelle turned in her seat to see a narrow drybed tunnelling the dark overhang of scrub. Then it was gone. It might have been the sunken highway of some mysterious civilisation, the yellow sand of its bed untrod; it seemed prepared like a formal Chinese garden for the reception of the dignitaries of a new generation who would one day walk this way.

  Bo’s hand shooting out. ‘Follow that creekbed and you’ll eventually come out onto your old man’s place. Haddon Hill.’ He lingered on the name as if he sought to reanimate it from the long slumber of past time, to thicken the absence. ‘Take you a month or two to find it. She goes around in a couple of big loops, that one. This old scrub’s too tight to get into her from up here.’

  Annabelle was trying to remember, but the country they passed through did not register with the images of her memory, the passing world beyond the windows of the train when she was a girl returning to school or coming home for holidays. ‘Are there wild cattle up this far?’ she asked, afraid that despite memory she might find she knew nothing of this place after all.

  Bo leaned on the trembling wheel to relight the stump of his cigarette. ‘There’s always a few old piker bullocks find their way into this country. But mostly cattle don’t come this far. There’s not much in the way of groundwater except after storms and nothing but wiregrass and scrub for them to chew on. She’s good country, though. There’s springs hidden up in them rock formations. Me and Dougald used to like tailing through these scrubs prospecting for scrubbers and enjoying ourselves, roasting porcupines and goannas over a winter fire. She’s hard country for stock but you and me can get ourselves a feed in there any time. You’re never gonna meet no one in there, I can tell you that. One of them big oil and gas companies come prospecting all through here from a helicopter a couple of years back, but they never found nothing. I don’t think they’re ever coming back. No!’ he said with emphasis, a private satisfaction in his tone. ‘She’s all virgin country from here way over onto Verbena Station and beyond. All that poison bendee. It don’t attract nobody.’

  He stopped the Pajero on a low gravelly rise and stepped down onto the road. Annabelle recognised the silver-leaved ironbarks, stunted and twisted in their growth, pale golden wattle in bloom, the dense scrub pressing to the verge of the road. She stood beside him. The wind cold, carrying the sweet honey perfume of the winter blossoms. The vast emptiness of the aluminium sky, chill and flat, meeting the scrubs way off to the southeast. A big double hill in the middle distance, rising from the grey blanket of trees like the soft contours of the human body in repose. No signs of habitation. No smoke. No evidence of roads. No powerlines strutting across the field of their view. An unbroken vista of wattle and bendee, patches of stunted ironbarks, and tall groves of perfumed sandalwood, so close grown it was impossible to step into it, swaying and rippling like some vast gilded field sown by giants, the blue coins of the ironbark leaves trembling a
nd rattling.

  Bo ducked his head aside and held the collar of his coat to protect the match flame from the wind. He puffed the new cigarette alight and pointed, his hand sweeping the country before them like a radar beacon. His indicating fingers came to rest, steadying on a heading. ‘Mount Bulgonunna,’ he said, pointing to the reposeful eminence. Two summits folded against the landscape, the breasts of a young woman in milk. ‘That’s it.’

  They stood looking, silent, the muffled thump of Arner’s music coming and going against the rushing of the wind, the screech of a raptor sweeping over them on a flight of inspection. ‘She changes her shape depending on which way you’re coming at her. Once you know the contours of Bulgonunna you’ll never get bushed in this country. I’ll show you.’ He squatted on the road and took up a twig. He swept the gravel with the flat of his hand and drew in the dust the shape of the hill before them. ‘Go on around further to the southeast and she starts coming up like this.’ He drew another shape beside the first, the two breasts beginning to merge now to form the appearance of buttocks. ‘Keep on going south and them two humps line up.’ He drew a third shape beside the second, this time a single hump. Almost a cone. ‘See! Like that. When them humps is lined up you know you’re looking back this way from over on the Verbena country. Go on around to the west and her two humps starts looking at you again. Only from the west they don’t look like they do from up here.’ He drew a fourth contour in the dust, his head to one side, critical of his draughtsmanship. ‘Coming in from the west she’s more like a hip and a shoulder.’ He ran his forefinger along the silhouette. ‘That curve of the saddle between.’ He looked up, ‘You see that? A man riding alone through the scrubs down there, well he sees her lying there ahead of him and he starts thinking of a woman. Just like he was coming up behind her, coming home, unexpected.’ He fell silent, gazing at his drawings in the dust, seeing himself coming in towards Bulgonunna from the west, a young man dreaming of the unapproachable red-haired girl from Haddon Hill. He turned and smiled at Annabelle. ‘Well you’re here beside me now, Annabellebeck,’ he said.

  She leaned and kissed him tenderly on the mouth. ‘I’m beside you, Bo Rennie.’

  ‘Grandma drew up these little diagrams for us kids before we ever went into this country. She had us camp by them for a day so we’d fix them in our minds.’ He twisted around and looked over his shoulder towards where Arner’s truck was parked back a few metres from the Pajero. ‘That boy’s not getting out of his truck.’ His tone was wistful, as if he commented upon a dispute within himself.

  Annabelle offered, ‘Shall I call him?’

  Bo turned aside and spat. ‘It’s no good calling him if he don’t want to come. He’ll do whatever you tell him to do, but he don’t think to do nothing unless you tell him. He’s got a gift that boy, but he don’t seem to want to do nothing with it. That’s what they’re like these days. We was eager to learn everything we could from Grandma.’ He squatted there, smoking his cigarette, thinking and puzzling. ‘He don’t seem to want to know his own country.’

  Annabelle said, ‘Maybe he already knows it.’ She paused. ‘In a way. You know? I don’t know why I say that, but maybe he knows it in a way you don’t know it.’ She looked at Bo, waiting for him.

  He said nothing, watching the wind shifting the dust across the face of his drawings, drifting an erasure against the clean lines etched by the twig in his hand, his grandmother’s lesson reappeared in front of him on the ridge overlooking Bulgonunna, drawn from his mind, the sacred mountain. He swept the maps away with his palm and stood up. ‘Me and Dougald walked our horses out onto the top of Bulgonunna one winter when we was boys. There’s permanent springs up there. It’s not hard to tell just exactly where they come out of the rocks. There’s a big old figtree. She’s the only one out here in this country. You don’t see them figs nowhere else up here. And it didn’t get there by accident neither. Them old people planted her beside the springs in a sheltered place against the rocks hundreds of years back. You can see that figtree from a day’s ride away. She’s the only dark green thing out there. There’s a family of flying foxes lives in her. They’re good little buggers roasted. Them old Murris could always get themselves a feed of sweet meat whenever they turned up at the figtree springs. You got everything you need in there.’ He turned away abruptly. ‘We’d better be making tracks.’ He stepped around the bonnet and climbed into the Pajero. He slammed the door, an impatience to be gone from the gravel ridge taking hold of him. ‘Yeah, them figtree springs.’ He clearly harboured in his mind unspoken anxieties about the outcome of their journey.

  Annabelle climbed into the Pajero and closed the door. It was a relief to get out of the cold wind. She reached into the back seat for her coat and put it on.

  Bo was leaning on the wheel gazing down the road ahead of them. He hadn’t started the motor. ‘That boy don’t think he needs to learn nothing from me,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it is with him.’ He straightened and turned the key and put the Pajero in gear.

  Annabelle said, ‘The young see things differently.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s it,’ Bo said, his disagreement gentle and unemphatic. He drove on down the road, Arner tailing them in his white truck through the wind-drifted haze of road dust.

  It was late afternoon by the time they topped a rise and saw the town laid out below them. The sun trailing down the western sky now and raising into sharp relief the distant cone hills swelling from the iron-dark sea of scrub. ‘There she is!’ Bo said softly, and changed down, slowing the Pajero to a crawl. ‘The last town heading west on this road.’

  Annabelle’s heart sank at the view that lay before them. And perhaps it was also the gathering lateness of the day that weighed unexpectedly upon her spirits, a premonition, or sense of having touched upon some truth long buried. ‘That can’t be Mount Coolon!’ she said. Where was the prosperous cattle town of her memory? A loose spread of meagre fibro-cement and weatherboard buildings lay in the shallow dip along the road below them. The dark line of the scrubs commencing again scarcely fifty metres beyond the furthest dwelling.

  Bo idled the Pajero past the derelict houses fronting the red strip of graded gravel. He gestured; it was a careless fling of the hand and had no precision in it. ‘They sold a few of these places to speculators. Poor fools. But there’s a whole heap of houses here they never even tried to sell. Abandoned them. There’s furniture left in some of them. They seen there was nothing else for it.’ He fell silent. ‘Them people that owns these places are never coming back. You can get yourself a house in Mount Coolon these days for nearly nothing.’ He laughed and turned aside and spat out the sidewindow. ‘There’s one or two hung on.’ He had brought the Pajero to a stop, the diesel motor ticking over. He was silent, examining the desolate scene before them, an expectation in the alertness of his poise. He said then, ‘We drove back into town. Red-haired Miss Annabelle Beck sitting up beside Bo Rennie.’ He chuckled throatily and looked across at her. ‘Who would have thought to ever see this day, my love?’ He gestured at the town. ‘What do you think of this place now? She’s your old town. You remember Mount Coolon like she was them days your old dad drove in from Haddon Hill and picked you up in that shiny white Ford Fairlane of his?’ He waited. ‘This that town?’

  Annabelle said with dismay, ‘I don’t remember any of this.’

  Bo reached for his tobacco. ‘I don’t think you ever give this place a second look in them days. Whenever I seen you, you was sitting next to your dad looking straight ahead down the road. That’s the way you was. Like you was sure of where you was going. Only it wasn’t Mount Coolon you had in your sights but some other place.’ He picked the Tally-Ho paper from his lip and tipped the roll of tobacco into it. ‘You never seen me. I knew you wasn’t as stuck up as people said you was. I knew you was just thinking.’

  She looked at him. ‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘Everyone had heard of Bo Rennie. I wouldn’t have dared to speak to you. I wouldn’t have known wh
at to say.’

  He smiled. ‘But you wasn’t thinking about me.’

  ‘I don’t know what I was thinking about then. The future, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s it. And this wasn’t it.’ He lit the cigarette, eyeing her cautiously from within the deeper shadow of his hatbrim. He took his foot off the brake and eased in the clutch. The Pajero rolled forward down the decline into town.

  She looked out the sidewindow, hoping to recognise some feature of the town. There was no indication of a town centre; no municipal offices, no planned layout of streets, but a seemingly random scatter of widely separated one-storey structures, temporary looking and constructed from fibro-cement sheeting and ripple-iron for the most part, with here and there a bleached weatherboard. Most of them in a tumbledown condition and spread out among a low regrowth of bendee and wattle, among which an isolated silver-leaved ironbark or yellowbox struggled to re-establish a footing. At a crossroads a yellow SHELL sign and a white-painted LP gas tank signified the only location in the town that appeared still to be operating. A red-painted cattle train and a gleaming new M.A.N. prime mover parked beside the pumps on the apron of the servo. A convenience store looked to be closed.

  Bo pointed out her window, ‘Police station there! Them coppers pulled out years ago. Flew away like a bunch of geese.’ Dipping his head to see past Annabelle, his hand shooting out. ‘See that lockup in behind! The square shack there with no windows! Me and Dougald passed a few cold nights in there waiting for the sun to come up.’ He hawked up some phlegm and spat out the side-window. ‘See what that place has come to now!’ He pointed. ‘See there! That humpy looking patch of tickgrass? That’s where them coppers used to shoot up their empty rum bottles in the morning. That grass is growing on pure glass. It just shows what some grasses will prosper on. Them old boys could drink all night and still shoot straight in the morning. They was the only fellers me and Dougald was scared of in them days.’ They were passing a cluster of pale fibro buildings, paint peeling, the burr grass and yakka grown up through the timbers of the verandahs and steps. A sheet of sprung roof-iron lifting and flailing in the wind, as if the police station was struggling to fly away from its unpropitious site and follow the flight of the departed officers. Bo said with feeling, ‘Them days is gone. And good riddance.’ A tennis court on the open ground next door to the police station, the chainlink sagged over, spindly wattles grown up through the blacktop, an umpire’s chair standing crookedly by the net post.