by Kim Mahood
—Long time. I worked for Fred Colson, Peter Seidle, Joe Mahood.
He is abrupt, had saddled his horse with an off-handed flair, and is obviously a good horseman, though hard on the horse. I tell him I am Joe Mahood’s daughter. He knows I know he never worked for my father.
One of the other stockmen, young and plump, asks me—You grew up here?
—Yes, with my brothers and sister.
He is curious about me. His name is Ronny Bumblebee, and this is traditional country for him.
In fact we don’t muster but wait at the bore while the small plane which flew in last night brings the cattle in from the sandhills to the south. We wait a long time in the freezing wind, with bursts of dust lifting from time to time out on the flat. The windmill spins and creaks, and the water from the overflow pipe spins out in a silver ribbon. One of the horses is startled into shying and pigrooting, dislodging its rider. He makes no attempt to hang on and flaps to the ground like a bundle of rags. He huddles there, looking embarrassed, while the white-haired stockman gallops off after his horse. They are gone for some time, but eventually the horse trots back with the rider on its tail. Both stirrup leathers are gone, so there is a search until they are found. The young Aborigine reluctantly gets back on the horse. He is not happy. He is not a good rider, and there is a fair chance the horse will get the better of him again at some stage during the day.
He reminds me of a boy who came from the mission next door to do a mustering season. There is the same passivity and half-ashamed demeanour. The other stockmen tolerated him, it was not in their nature to victimise him. But they were mildly scornful of the young men from the mission, who didn’t learn stock-camp skills, couldn’t ride well and whose traditional culture had been largely supplanted by mission training. When they caught him stealing tobacco the other stockmen came to my father, for fear he would think it was them.
Cattle are beginning to trickle in over the sand dunes, and there is some activity in order to hold them at the bore. I’m grateful to be able to move and get a little warmer. The plane does a few more sweeps until it becomes clear there are no more cattle to come, and we start moving the mob along. We hold them at a dam a few kilometres away and stop for dinner camp, then start them up for the walk back to the homestead. Every clump of spinifex and anthill is familiar, I am no longer sure that twenty years have elapsed. The stockmen could easily be the stockmen I worked with as a teenager. The dust in my mouth and eyes is the same dust I tasted then, my irritation at being left at the tail of the mob is the same. The difference is that now I ride out onto the wing instead of staying in the dust and accepting my place at the bottom of the pecking order. Someone else can push the tail along for a while. The discomfort is the same, the sore legs at the beginning of the season, the cold, the dry skin, the hair and eyes full of dust. Most of the time I couldn’t wait for it to be over. But I would never miss an opportunity to spend time in the stock camp and did a full season when I was seventeen. This was where the real life of the station existed for me.
SHE IS ALWAYS SECRETLY a little afraid for the first few days in the stock camp. Afraid of making some serious blunder, of being in the wrong place, of not knowing what to do. But she has made her choice. This is where one learns to act. This is where one chooses between acting and being acted upon. There has never been a question of where her alliances lie. She is, after all, her father’s daughter. With the encroachment of puberty she has cropped her long hair and is frequently mistaken for a boy. She cannot separate her own desires from her father’s expectations of her. She cannot tell where the boundary between them lies.
It is always taken for granted that she will choose to spend her school holidays in the camp. The stock work is a means of re-establishing her position as a competent and significant part of life on the station. And she does prefer it, on the whole, to the domestic routines of the homestead, a world of women and children, of which she is neither, though subtly pulled between the two. The women she knows are plump and passive, or raw-boned and strident, or her mother, who is too close for comfort. There is nothing in the stuff of their daily lives that she wants for herself. Their lives are built around the maintenance of family and homestead, teaching children, endless amounts of cooking and cleaning and washing. She does not grasp that there might be compensations and pleasure concealed somewhere in all this. It seems to her a world of relentless and inescapable drudgery.
She prefers her clearly defined difference in the world of the stock camp, a white girl among black men, simultaneously privileged as the boss’s daughter and lowest on the pecking order for her lack of experience. The rules are clear, the prohibitions unassailable, the value of achieving a level of skill and competence unquestionable. She has chosen the pared-down simplicity of the swag and campfire, from which she often yearns after the comforts of the homestead, though she would never have admitted it.
This first day she goes out with the stockmen to kill a bullock. The last of the salt meat has been eaten, and everyone is hungry for fresh beef. Her father has insisted they use the 310 rifle, because with the 303 there is too much risk of killing the horsetailer or wounding the horse plant. The beast they choose is a big, quiet red bullock, and the plan is to drive up close and shoot him from the vehicle. Harry is driving, and Rex has the gun. As they drive towards the bullock the beast throws up his head, and Rex throws up the gun at the same time and fires, the way they do it in the movies. The bullet pings off somewhere harmlessly and there is a cackle of laughter from the front of the vehicle.
Big Mick, who is on the back with the girl, says with a grin—Rex can’t shoot.
The bullock watches them, a little suspiciously, and the girl wills him to make a run for it.
Harry has the gun now and drives one-handed with the barrel resting on the window frame. He is a better shot than Rex and actually hits the bullock somewhere. The beast bellows with fright and surprise and gallops off with his tail in the air. The Toyota plunges after him across the spinifex, and Mick and the girl cling to the back as Harry blasts off a couple more shots, both of which hit the bullock but only make him run faster. Mick leans down and shouts to Harry in lingo, and Harry passes the gun up to him. The girl crouches down as low as she can get and wishes she does not have to witness what is going to happen next.
Harry wheels the Toyota past the fleeing bullock and blocks it, then Mick takes a shot at close range. He hits the beast in the eye, but it is not enough to bring the bullock down. He shoots again, another head shot, and the beast begins to run in circles, flinging his head from side to side as if to shake off the mutilated eye. Mick keeps shooting until the magazine is empty, but the animal keeps stumbling about, refusing to fall down. Mick shouts and the vehicle stops and he leaps off with the axe in his hand. At the same time Harry jumps out and grabs the bullock by the tail and pulls him down. Big Mick swings the axe, all sixteen stone of him behind the blunt-sided axeblow to the skull of the wounded beast. The animal stretches momentarily rigid before giving a long shudder, as if relieved to be finally dead. Rex is already there with the butcher knife, cutting deeply through the hide of the throat and into the jugular. He digs a channel for the blood, which pulses out in a bright pink froth. They stand around grinning. Mick mimes Rex with the gun, and they all break up with laughter. Harry says better they leave the gun next time and just bring Mick with the axe. Rex makes a fire, and as they cut up the animal they throw scraps of meat onto the flames, then eat them, barely singed. When they bring the meat back to the camp the horsetailer says laconically he thought someone must have started a war out there.
Some time in the night horses wake her, moving quietly away from the camp, hobbles clinking faintly, to be gone as far as possible before the horsetailer sets out to look for them before dawn. She wakes again to a shadow of movement as the horsetailer leaves the camp. He must have them back and yarded by daylight. The musterers will be on the move by sunrise.
From her swag the girl watches the horses
come in. They make no sound save for an occasional clink of the hobbles strung around their necks. The sound of their hooves is muffled in the soft earth. They have come out of the night country, dark shapes against a sky which has barely begun to lighten. They have yet to take on the material substance of day creatures. The horsetailer rides bareback behind them, a shadow of a horseman driving shadows of horses.
Now there is movement at the campfire. She can see her father’s silhouette, stoking the fire. The radio is on a country music station, crooning mournfully into the darkness. These mornings she is always out of the swag quickly, she could not bear to be thought slow or unwilling. It is cold, her boots are stiff and icy as she pulls them on, and she struggles into her short woollen coat. She has slept fully dressed and has a clean shirt and underwear under her pillow. The swag is basic, a sleeping bag, blanket and pillow. It is not too difficult to leave it.
They are moving camp today, to the next bore. Her father will take the stock-camp trailer and set up camp, and several of the stockmen will drive the sale mob. This has cut down the musterers to five. They ride out together for the first hour, and cut some fresh tracks over the first sandridge. The riders split, two to follow the tracks, three to make a wider sweep. The girl rides out with Harry and Rex. They don’t talk much. There is a slight constraint between them, although the stockmen have known her since she was a child. They are all used to it and manage it well enough. There has always been a mutual regard between them, never spoken. Their grins of approval mean a great deal to her. To read a track, bring back a beast, throw a rope, and win that brief white flash of teeth in a black face will remain for her a sheerer measure of worth than anything she is to encounter in later life. From time to time she asks them the name of something in their language. She is trying to learn the hybrid lingo used on the station—Wolmajarri with a sprinkling of Warlpiri and Kukatja—but is hampered by self-consciousness.
They ride suddenly onto the skeleton of a mare and foal. The foal is half born, head and forefeet through the mare’s pelvis, the rest of the tiny bones trapped in the cage of her body. It is a parable in bone, laid out on a patch of open red ground, untouched by dingoes. There is not much to mark a struggle. The mare seems to have died quietly enough, exhausted no doubt from the exertions of the labour. The foal would barely have glimpsed life before it died. The riders look down on it from a great height, arbitrary witnesses surprised by a cage of bone arching out of the sparse clumps of dry grass.
Riding back in the late afternoon behind the cattle they have flushed out of the dunes, Rex carries a newborn calf across the withers of his horse. The girl feels her body dissolve into the light, her self moving upwards and outwards until it is nothing but air and light.
All night the cattle sing and mumble in the unaccustomed constraints of the cable and timber yards. The girl falls asleep to the thin wail of a dingo, remote beyond the murmuring cattle. Above her the sky tilts slowly towards morning as she wakes and sleeps and wakes again to the small soft movements of the waking camp.
By daylight the branding fire is lit, the brands lined up and beginning to heat, and the bronco horse is in harness. He is new to the job, just learning, a big solid amiable young horse with Percheron blood. Harry uncoils the rope from the heavy saddle, loops it out and over the head of a calf, which leaps and flings itself bellowing at full stretch away from the rope. The horse leans imperturbably against the calf’s weight, dragging it up to the timber bronco panel, and the stockmen rope a fore and hind leg, tying them off to the ends of the panel. It is a male calf, and Scotty, the smallest stockman, grabs the free hind leg, hauling it out straight and exposing the small testicles, which her father excises neatly from the scrotal sac with a sharp pocket knife. The girl runs with the brand. There is the quick stink of burning hair as she plants it on the woolly rump and returns it to the fire. The head rope is pulled off and a shape nipped neat as a piece of jigsaw puzzle from the bottom of the ear. As the leg ropes are removed the calf leaps to its feet and gallops, yelling, to the middle of the mob. Its mother searches aggressively, butting away strange calves and calling an answer to her howling child. The whole process has taken less than a minute, and already Harry has a second calf on the rope, a heifer this time. Mick searches in the dust for the discarded testicles and places them carefully in a billycan, a delicacy for later.
By midmorning they have branded a hundred and fifty calves, and Mick’s billycan is overflowing. The girl is flushed and sweating from the fire and has been thinking about the smoko break for some time now. They are into the tail end of the cleanskins, some big mickeys which escaped last year’s branding. Rex has brought in the old bronco horse, who does not wear himself out against the bigger animals but simply stands his ground and then moves when the rope slackens. A mickey lashes out at the leg rope and catches her father unexpectedly in the midriff, dropping him instantly unconscious to the ground. He looks suddenly small and fragile, his shirt a stain of blue on the red earth, and the girl drops the brand and runs to his side. The stockmen leg-rope the mickey and tie him down, then stand back from the fallen man, who comes to and props himself up, laughing shakily into his daughter’s stricken face. The offending mickey lies utterly passive against the bronco panel and is summarily castrated, earmarked, branded and released. It seems an appropriate moment to stop for smoko. As they walk to the camp low murmurs of laughter break from the black stockmen. Because it is the boss who was kicked, it is not an occasion for the kind of hilarity it would have caused had it been one of them, but already they are making a story of it for the evening campfire.
11
BACK AT THE HOMESTEAD I try to record in my journal some of the sensations and emotions this return has provoked. I sit in the green vinyl armchair and hunt through the pages of my father’s station diary for something that will anchor me to this place that is so unchanged, so utterly changed.
The diary begins on Sunday, October 6th, 1963, written in fountain pen in my father’s beautiful handwriting. It is mostly a log of activities, of sinking and equipping bores, of track-riding and trucking stock, of checking waters and getting the homestead established. What emerges is a daily tracery of movement about the country, a constant struggle with broken-down vehicles and bores and equipment, of stock perishing and of men pulling out. The ubiquitous killer, the term used for the beast killed for meat, is mentioned about every six or seven days, beef providing the staple diet. I find the first entry for today’s date, 21st June.
Sunday, 21st June, 1964
South of Ferdie’s through the sand ridges to Skeleton Valley.
Should be easy for water.
Looked at several places across to W. boundary.
Back to Lake Alec. Camped.
Warm day. No wind.
My father described Skeleton Valley to me, but I never saw it. It was an ancient watercourse of eroded limestone, a lost valley carved into the forms of mythical beasts and skulls and headstones. It was drilled successfully and good water was found at a site nearby, which was named the Graveyards. Windmill parts ferried in through the dunes were discovered to belong to two different mills which did not fit together (at least this is the story I have from hearsay). Other priorities took precedence, and the job of equipping the Graveyards bore became one of those chores to be dealt with when time allowed. According to Adam, who has flown over the site, the windmill parts are still clearly visible from the air. He tried to reach the site once, following invisible hints of an old track, but ran out of spare tyres and turned back. On the map he has given me the bore is wrongly marked as salty. I find myself obscurely pleased to know that the Graveyards and Skeleton Valley remain inaccessible, an unresolved fragment from my father’s story.
June 21st, 1965 and 1966 are recorded in the diary, but there are no entries for either day. Weeks of days and dates are neatly inscribed, as if insisting upon the formal passage of time. A uniform number of lines are left between the dates, allocating each day an equal value. Among the pag
es of the unwritten diary I hear a whisper of my father’s other voice. But it is too soon. I am not ready to listen yet.
Instead I flick back through the brief entries which reiterate vehicle and windmill breakdowns, staff and stock movements, more breakdowns, occasional visits to hospital with injuries. My father’s personality remains almost invisible in the written word, though a rare dry remark hints at irony. There is no evidence of the streak of self-parody which emerged when he played the guitar, warbling his way mournfully through ‘China Doll’ and ‘High Noon’. He had a good singing voice, and he made up in panache whatever his guitar-playing lacked in finesse. The guitar was put away when he stopped drinking, and he did not play again for years. He was a good storyteller, and something of a ham actor and mimic, leaping to his feet and gesturing extravagantly to illustrate the dramatic moments of an anecdote. His sense of humour was acute but unreliable, for he only sometimes took himself lightly. When he felt his dignity infringed on he would retreat, leaving a large oppressive absence which we skirted guiltily.
The diary gives none of this away. My father moves through the pages, a small, broad-shouldered man. He did not have the strut I remember as characteristic of many men of his stature. In fact he never seemed small, for he carried about with him a sense of natural authority, compounded by the hint of something hidden, potentially dangerous. The danger was psychological, not physical. He was not a violent man, though capable of immense reserves of physical energy when required. And the danger, one felt, was mostly to himself.
The entry for May 19th, 1964 triggers a sharp snapshot of memory.
Worked on tractor. Did stock take.
Tried grader out. Bill W, Ferdie, Bob S arrived.
Ferdie’s offsider bushed on bike. Found him and brought bike back.