by David Mason
Even so, there were compensations. As we moved along I looked back at the three, Dalhousie off to one side investigating a bush, and there they were in line abreast. I felt my heart swell; it was for love of these three and their calf. They were so very different in temperament, but when I said go, they followed. And followed beyond what I thought was possible or reasonable to ask. I knew that when the time came I would miss them very much.
The track into Wiluna took us past an Aboriginal outstation of corrugated iron and paint-peeled weatherboard homes where the people did not wave or laugh. They kept their heads down, as if a great load weighed heavy on their shoulders. The only sounds were the lonely banging of a door on its frame and the yelp of a dog.
Walking up into town we were met by Wiluna’s children. It was school holidays and news of our arrival spread fast. All were Aboriginal children in colourful clothes, smiling, clapping, cheering and coughing. Little fingers pointed at my friends. Dalhousie stayed close to Chloe. I told my new friends we had come from the desert where the sun comes up. Little faces frowned and lips were pushed up to noses and viscous green snot stuck. ‘Never been that way,’ they said, ‘Never seen camel before either.’
I asked the children to take us to the local caravan park, a place where I could camp, tie up the camels and let them feed and rest for a day. Little black hands reached for mine, and others for my shirt and my pants, just to touch me, help me along the way and make sure I did not get lost. Our escorts took us past shells of houses where shiny black bodies with forearms over faces lay on a car bench seat in the dust, and dark moving shadows were crows.
A sign on the caravan park perimeter fence, with its barbed wire and three metres of mesh, said: ‘park gates are locked between 6pm and 6 am’.
I clipped the camels to trees opposite the park, and following some inquiries camped outside the caretaker’s residence, the camels enjoying the grass and rolling in the dust. I reported to the police station, handed over my rifle and gave them what rounds I had left. They told me I could send the rifle home if I wanted, so long as the breech block or bolt was sent in a different package.
After washing clothes and cleaning gear, I made my way to the Club Hotel, the only pub in town, with a convenient gate providing for entry from the caravan park. I asked how to get to the front bar. The barman paused from his wiping the bench and said, ‘You don’t want to go in there. There’s coons fighting all the time.’
I went anyway and found myself in the front bar, a large dark room, slivers of light in the ceiling and beer served through slits in a grating. The place was concrete and reminded me too much of a prison cell. I could not ask for a beer here and was appalled that people could live and drink in a place where they were fed alcohol like prisoners. My shoulders slumped and my body sagged, limp in the knowledge that people should be so complicit in their own humiliation and fall.
He must have seen the sadness in my shoulders and I felt a wide warm hand on my back. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You drink in the other bar and we do our things here. Better to be separate sometimes.’ His warm hand walked me out to the evening light where broken black noses were slouched against the pub wall. A few metres away, across the road, ‘glass hill’ was a shattered brown diamond mound of smashed bottles and stubbies. His warmth and care for me only made me feel even worse.
I sat at the whitefella bar and ordered a mixed grill and a beer and watched TV for a while. I made my way back to the caravan park through the hotel’s garden, checked the camels and hit the swag. Though I had now crossed the Simpson and the Gibson deserts, I did not feel like celebrating, in fact I felt sad as hell.
I felt the camels stir before I heard the screaming and the threats of violence. The alcohol-fuelled arguments went on through the night, as did the smashing of bottles, screams and once or twice a devastated lonely whimper and a sniffle. I wondered if many people in Wiluna slept.
It was a night of dislocated obscenities and finished people; a people whose spiritual and emotional link to the past was language and land. That link, that umbilical cord had been cut, and they no longer had the fuel and food of their history, their language or their stories. Even worse was the knowledge that, once lost, it could not be passed on to their children. Their food did not have its roots in the red land, or the crystal waters of the rock pools. Instead, it was an amber transfusion, beer from the Club Hotel, where knowledge of loss and dislocation was numbed and the only way to express a present hell and a future without hope was through stupor and violence.
In the hour or so before dawn I slept and was woken by small voices asking, ‘Hey camel man, you all right?’ I folded back the canvas flap to see two small boys, bare feet, shorts, T-shirts and thick black hair. Jerry had a large bottle of coke in one hand, the fingers of his other hand wrapped around the mesh that kept him out. Billy watched me with enormous black eyes while he munched his way through a large bag of crisps.
I asked them if they were eating breakfast and they nodded seriously. I left the swag and prepared for them both a breakfast of muesli and honey. I sat watching both as they chewed their way through the dried fruit and bran. They did not seem keen on the breakfast. ‘Too long chew him up,’ Jerry said.
I spent the day on the telephone, calling Amber and a number of radio stations. Tears filled my eyes when Amber said she was proud of me. Radio stations had to fit me into their schedules so I waited for a long time by the phone. While I was waiting I met Kerry, known she said as the Dragon Lady of Wiluna. She and her husband Ken, who had been in the army, were the publicans of the Club Hotel.
As I stood waiting for a call on the public phone, Kerry told me what she thought about the Aboriginal people in Wiluna. She told me how, after pension day, she made sure that mothers bought food for their families before coming to the pub. She pointed to the American Indian dream catcher above the phone and said that there were more live legends and languages in the United States than here in Australia. I asked her how could she be so sure?
‘David,’ she said, ‘have you looked outside today? These people have ruined themselves. I don’t make them drink. I don’t stop them from going back to their country. Isn’t the government going out of its way to give land to Aboriginal people who want it? No, I’m not taking any responsibility for what’s outside. Why should I?’
A day later I left town and saw what I had not noticed before. Over the door to the front bar, the Aboriginal bar, Kerry had painted ‘Welcome to Paradise’ in rainbow colours flanked by two tropical palms. Across the road ‘glass hill’, the smashed, shattered glass was covered with a hint of dew so that it looked like a mound of dirty frozen teardrops.
I could not get out of town quickly enough.
Next morning I was woken well before 5 a.m. by flies pricking the sweat around my face. I poured some water into the billy to make a cup of coffee and was greeted with a whiff of chlorine. This after only two days in jerry cans. Even the water from Wiluna was bad and I wondered if it would last the four days to Meekatharra.
Two days later we were only 20 kilometres to Meekatharra and we were met by John and Leah Bryant, with whom I had shared a coffee at the caravan park at Wiluna. They asked me if there was anything I needed in Meekatharra. On a moment’s reflection I said that all we needed was a place to put the camels.
John and Leah told me later what they had found. They went to the shire council where men in creased white shirts told him ‘in no uncertain terms’ that there were to be no camels in the town. Then they visited the police who were apparently surprised by the council’s refusal, then to Elders, the cattle and camel feed people. The Elders people said I could put the camels in the cattle yards just out of town, which solved my immediate problem. They even said they would drive me out some lucerne hay for my friends, which anticipated and solved my second problem. John and Leah did not have to help me. In fact it was probably quite inconvenient for them to do so, but I was grateful they did and I told them so. They even brought out a c
hicken and chips takeaway pack for lunch. It was salty, greasy and quite delicious.
As we made our way into Meekatharra, the hills around made it very clear it was a mining town. It was apparent from the bleached red and orange heaps of earth from under the earth’s skin, tens of metres high across many hectares around the town, insulating it from the flat and scrub of the inland. The heaps were devoid of vegetation or life, just colours of the land that had been in darkness for thousands of years.
I turned the camels into the cattle yards just out of town, piled their loads into another empty yard and left them to enjoy bales of lucerne hay. Taking a small bag that held a change of clothes and shaving kit, I walked into town and checked into the Commercial Hotel.
Following a shower to sluice my body clean of dust, I descended the steps to the front bar of the hotel. Here I met Les Baker. Les was at least 70 years old and had lived in Meekatharra for 47 years. He told me he was on the last truck run from Carnegie to Wiluna and the train that used to run from town to the coast. The barman at the hotel gave Les cheap beer. As we sat there in the early afternoon Les said, ‘Yep, I guess this bar is the only real home I have.’ He was quiet for a moment then I bought him a beer.
As I lay on the bed in room 1, I could not sleep. I wondered what the camels were doing. I could not breathe properly, I felt as if the walls were closing around me. The air was too close and I could not see the stars. I needed to be outside. With a creak of the bed springs I went to the window, drew the flimsy curtain open and looked to the night sky. I only went back to bed as the stars began to fade and melt into the light of day.
In keeping with the formal requirement that animals moving across state boundaries be checked by vets, Chris Brandis of the Western Australian Agricultural Protection Board ran his hands over camel bellies and gave them a clear bill of health. Indeed he seemed to think they were the healthiest, happiest camels he had seen in some time. The lucerne hay was just the thing. They were looking fatter than ever before, even Chloe with an always hungry Dalhousie suckling from her. Chris showed us a route out of town and late in the afternoon we camped opposite Opal Mountain about l5 kilometres out of Meekatharra.
We were slow in leaving town. First, after settling up the feed bill, a long chat with Richard from the Elders feed store whose brother was running Mileura Station on our way to the coast. Then, and as we were saddling up, we were joined by Chris Huddle who lived in a small shack at the cattle yards, who used to be a dogger. Chris said that even now a dingo scalp was $40.
I wrote up my diary as the rice was on the boil. It was a tuna mornay night. While I had some time I double checked our route and distances. I found that as of just short of Belele Station we had 700 kilometres to Steep Point. This meant we had to average just under 30 kilometres for the next 27 days by which time I wanted us to be at Steep Point.
It was an early start next day and we made it into Belele homestead, the whitewashed building made of locally cut and carted stone, with a billiard table green and smooth lawn of couch grass and kikuyu, just before midday. I had lunch in the kitchen and sat at a large table with Brett, Coralie and the station hands. Brett and Coralie Smith managed the property for the local Aboriginal Corporation.
Lunch was marvellous, lots of sweet lamb and I felt very good all afternoon. I also had the chance to change the dreadful water secured at the Meekatharra cattle yards. As I sat outside the kitchen filling jerry cans and trying to recalculate the distances, I decided that 700 kilometres did not seem right at all. The track we were on was marked on the map as the primary route to Mileura Station. In fact a new track, exiting the northerly Carnarvon track, headed west 25 kilometres further north from Belele homestead. All this meant that I reckoned we were now 583 kilometres to Steep Point and I breathed a sigh of relief.
We camped on the Mount Hale Road, a dirt track about l5 kilometres along from Koonmarra Station. At Koonmarra we met Maree Brosnan, her daughter and kids. Maree was not at all keen on letting me through her place to take a short cut. Not that I blamed her. As she said, they had not used those tracks, my intended short cut, in the five years they had been on the property. I nodded, told her I understood, and undertook to follow the usual track north toward Mount Hale and west to Mileura Station.
It was a small world. Over biscuits and a cup of tea Maree told me that Snowy Brosnan, her husband, used to work at Wongawol and knew Margaret Donovan, the spinster aunt who left the property to the Snells. Certainly it was a hard land, but those who knew it came to love it and they stayed.
At the end of the day’s walk I looked at the map, took out a pencil, and reckoned we did almost 40 kilometres, so that we were just l0 kilometres short of Mileura homestead. The track had come out at Nama Bore where a road sign on a windmill vane marked ‘Mileura 27 kilometres’. As I sat on my tin that night, watching the flames lick the wood, I wondered at my fixation with distances. Sometimes I thought numbers the most important thing in the world, and I knew that I had become a little mad.
I met Patrick Walsh next morning. His brother Richard told him we were on our way. Patrick was the only person working Mileura Station, over 250,000 acres of mixed sheep and cattle. His family had owned it for generations. Patrick offered me a cup of tea, gave me a tour of the homestead and told me stories about the past. Just inside the front door was an old oilskin jacket that had a rust stain on its front. Patrick told me that the coat had been the bed of a baby born decades before to one of the Aboriginal women who lived on the station. ‘It’s a reminder of where we come from,’ said Patrick, ‘a raw place where we help each other when we can.’ He agreed to meet us that evening at our camp on the track west.
That evening I sat on the swag watching the fire, the only sounds were camels chewing their cud and the sighs of the mulga under the flame. Patrick pulled up just on dark. He took off his hat and put on a cap. He reached into the tray for a small esky and groaned, ‘Me back’s buggered, but don’t you try to help me.’ He put the esky beside me then leaned forward and cocked his torso over his left leg to rest his lower back damaged from falling from too many motorbikes. He shuffled a little and sat down. His fine red hair was the colour of the fire, his eyes the sky five minutes after sunrise, alight alive and imbued with the energy of a new day. His hands freckled and scabbed, like so many ants stuck to his skin. Patrick Walsh was 27 years old.
He looked into the fire and told me of his great-grandfather, who had ridden here from Perth, over 500 kilometres away. Patrick said that his grandfather stood to the west of the great bowl that he named Mileura Station and decided it was here he wanted to create a family and raise his children.
I asked Patrick what his plans were for a family, and briefly, the dark smudges below his eyes appeared to grow darker. He said, ‘It’s hard to get a good girl out here. They like the city life and it’s difficult for them to get settled unless they’ve come from it.’
Patrick was thoughtful for a moment and changed subject. He talked about the fires, the floods, the loss of family and the droughts. ‘Sure it’s hard sometimes,’ he said, ‘but where else could we go?’ I asked him how much the property was worth. Well over a million dollars he reckoned. And how much did the property return last year? ‘All up we paid ourselves about $20,000,’ he said. I told him that I was no accountant, but that such a low return was not much good for any investment.
Lining up for a drink.
He looked at me and said, ‘Sure you’re right, but that’s not the point. We have to live here. It’s our place. Who else would look after it properly?’ He sat on my food tin, leaned forward and scraped up into his hands a little of the red dust at his feet. He sat back and gently rubbed his hands together, savouring the texture, his eyes closed for a moment, concentrating to feel every grain as it touched his skin. He let the dust fall to the ground and as the last grain joined the others he asked, ‘You know what “Mileura” means?’ Of course, I had no idea. He said, ‘It means “see a long way” in the local language.’ Patri
ck was quiet then, and we sat together, not saying anything for some time.
Setting up the mobile sat phone.
Headed to the Murchison River.
I loved Patrick Walsh for his various hurts, his scabs and his serious concerns. In one way, he was like a soldier, permanently on patrol of that place that was his responsibility. In another way he was a warrior priest guarding the past and its significance for the future. I loved him and envied him because his life had meaning beyond the dollar and necessary return. His life was rooted in the land, in place and its stories. My world told me I was to work to consume, consume as much as I could, and then die.
Patrick Walsh – Mileura Station.
We were away just after 7 a.m. next morning and did not set up camp until 6 p.m. – just after what my map told me was 7 Mile Bore or about five kilometres short of Berringarra Station. The day was full of a light drizzle rain and thankfully cool. We walked through the Jack Hills, according to Patrick some of the oldest stones in the world, and from a low saddle could see into the great bowl of Mileura Station.
That evening I ate spaghetti bolognaise for what must be around the one hundred and fiftieth time on my journey. The tuna mornay did not have enough fat in it. I began to think about some of the other things Patrick told me. He said that the original homestead could be found along Poonthoon Pool. The house was moved to its present location as the old homestead was too far away from the centre of the station.