by Alex Miller
A couple of weeks after he came into the turnip field I was drinking a cup of tea with my new Australian friend and his wife in the kitchen of the small manor house they’d bought. He got up from the table and fetched a book. ‘If it’s the wild frontiers of this world you want to see,’ he said, ‘you should read this.’
The year was 1953 and the name Nolan meant nothing to me, but the fine black-and-white silver gelatin photographs captivated me. One in particular I still recall today with the smell and feel of those times, catching in its grainy image myself being that boy again. Three stockmen stand in deep shadow in various attitudes of ease on the verandah of a hut, the broad brims of their hats and the picked-out points of their spurs. They are gazing out into an empty landscape and seem to be waiting for something, the horizon an uneventful line dividing earth and sky, the only feature the wretched limbs of a dead tree in the middle distance. I read the caption, You can ride for a month out here and never strike a fence, and was gripped by the dream of finding Sidney Nolan’s outback for myself. To ride with those nameless stockmen out into the emptiness of their landscape and over that mysterious horizon …
Almost a year later, on a grey November afternoon, my family stood in a close group on the platform at Liverpool Street Station, watching my train pulling out, waving me off for Tilbury and the other side of the world. I was not to see them again for ten years. In this last remembered image of my family gathered together in the one place, my little brother is standing between my father and mother holding my father’s hand. My older sister and my younger sister are holding each other’s hands and are standing up close against the skirts of my mother’s coat. It is as if they fear that separation might prove to be a contagion. Forty years later, when my brother came out to Australia to visit me, I asked him if he remembered seeing me off at Liverpool Street. He said, ‘Of course I remember it. We were all crying.’ My brother’s words surprised me. For although I was leaving a country and a family that I loved that day, I was too excited by the adventure ahead of me to fear that I would miss my country, or to notice that my leaving had brought great distress to my family. I was going to Nolan’s outback to join the stockmen. The train was moving. The Australian’s book was in my suitcase. I had acquired a new reality.
When I got off the boat in Sydney six weeks later I was still underage and was supposed to report my arrival in Australia to the authorities. But I was too impatient to reach the outback to bother with this formality and I set off at once with my suitcase. Walking north along the highway I thumbed down a truck. The driver was friendly. My story did not surprise him. ‘You’re doing the right thing, old mate,’ he said. ‘I should have done it when I was your age.’ He drove me all the way to the southern Queensland coastal town of Gympie and got me a job on a dairy farm where he knew the farmer and his wife. The truck driver and I had become friends of the road and he had led me into the way of being Australian. It wasn’t difficult for me. My mother’s people were Irish and my father was from Glasgow, my parents’ cultures the very ones from which the majority of white Australians had their origins in those days. Being Australian felt more natural to me than trying to be English ever had. With an intuitive certainty that is only available to us when we are young, I knew that my arrival on the other side of the world had been a homecoming. I had found the place where the outsiders had gone long ago and knew myself to be among them.
Gympie was hot, the vegetation subtropical, fierce taipans lurked among the flowering lantana, and death adders sunned themselves along the riverbank when we went for a swim. It was all new and exotic and it fascinated me, but it was only a stop along the way. A dairy farm in Gympie was not Nolan’s outback. After a couple of months I showed my book to the farmer and his wife and told them my dream. They understood and offered to help me with the next stage of the journey. They had never been to the outback themselves, they said. ‘Will you write and tell us what it’s like?’ Their curiosity was sincere and I promised I would write. But I never did. With that leave-taking I was beginning to accumulate my grown-up store of small regrets. There would be occasions for larger ones later.
He was gentlemanly and had about him an interesting air of melancholy, which I thought at once had something to do with a solitariness in himself. He liked to drink Pedro Ximenez black sherry in front of the fire in the evening—or even during the afternoon—and he loved to read. He preferred a beret to a broad-brimmed hat and was inclined to stay indoors. He was the owner of a sixty-four-thousand-acre cattle station in the open ironbark forests of the Central Highlands of Queensland, his domain set deep among the wild granite escarpments of the Carnarvon Range, his pastures watered by the abundant stream of Coona Creek. He was my new boss. I was shy with his youthful wife and addressed her respectfully as Mrs Wells, while I dreamed of being her lover. He insisted I call him Reg. There was little to be done on the station just then, he said, and he gazed out from the front verandah at the silver grass of the plain and the dark ironbark forests beyond and the rim of fortress hills, as if he dreamed of being somewhere else. I could spend my days reading if I wished, he said, and smiled and left us.
I explored the wilderness on horseback, camping on my own for days high in the escarpments, where the dingoes were so wild they had no fear of me. At Christmas Reg said I should fight in the boxing tournament in Springsure to raise money for the Red Cross, and I reluctantly obeyed him. With more enthusiasm I rode in the bareback and saddle bronc events in the rodeo, as all the other young stockmen of the district did. When autumn came we mustered the half-wild cattle, then together drove the steers to the market, riding behind the mob at an easy walk, making our eight-mile stage along the stock route each day. And in the sandhill country I smelled the heady perfume of the wattle scrubs in bloom for the first time. Reg and I camped under the stars at night, lying in our swags beside our fire, I talking of my dreams and he of his disenchantments.
‘Here’s a book to suit you,’ he said one day, and handed me Sir Richard Burton’s two-volume Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah. Burton’s journey inspired me with a new resolve to persist in my own journey. I knew by then that the Central Highlands of Queensland was not the outback, but I loved it on Goathlands Station with Reg and his family, so stayed longer than I intended. He and I often sat by the fire till late on winter evenings, reading, sipping sherry and smoking. He had been delighted to discover that I could shoe horses and ride, but it was not station work that was his first love. Before anything else I learned from Reg Wells the pleasure of reading, and something of its art. After two years I told him, ‘It’s only that you’ve been so kind to me that I’ve stayed this long.’ He smiled; he had known he would lose me one day. He radioed his old friend, the manager of a vast cattle station in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria, a tract of country bigger than Wales.
I shook hands with Reg for the last time at the Springsure railway station, the family gathered to see me off. I was leaving behind me a scene that recalled to my mind my other, earlier farewell at Liverpool Street. This time I was more emotional. This time I had doubts. This time I wondered if what I was leaving behind might not be the very thing I had set out in search of. I left the Nolan book with Reg. It would sit nicely on his bookshelves among his accounts of travels.
Three days out of Springsure on slow trains took me to the far western cattle town of Cloncurry, a huddle of pubs and stores in those days, stained with the monochrome dust of the landscape. Not the famous red of the western deserts but a less distinct tone, somewhere between grey and brown. I picked up the mail coach, an old army blitz wagon loaded with drums of fuel and stores for the stations along the Leichhardt River, and rode it the three hundred miles north to Augustus Downs Station. There was no road, just wheel tracks through the savannah. Where these crossed the waterless bed of the river the mailman picked his own way among the rocks and treacherous sands.
Alex (left) with Reg Wells at Goathlands, near Springsure, Queensland
The manager of Augustus Downs drove his jeep at high speed across the plain for sixty miles. We did not need to stop to open gates. There were no fences. This was Nolan’s outback. The cattle camp was a tent fly and a smoking fire among the timber on the bank of the Leichhardt River. Under the fly a man was kneading dough on a board. When I greeted him he went on kneading his dough, mumbling to himself, ignoring me. Towards evening a group of about thirty horsemen rode into the camp, raising a cloud of dust. They formed a half-circle around me, not smiling nor offering a greeting. Two of them were white, the others were black, their hair and beards long and unkempt, their broad-brimmed hats and mounts covered with the same grey-brown dust that had clothed the buildings of the town. They were the legendary ringers of the great plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria, tribal Aborigines on their own country. We became friends. When I left the Gulf, I knew I would never belong in that country. Not as the Aboriginal stockmen belonged in it. No matter how welcome they made me, I would always be passing through on my way to somewhere else. And passing through on my way to somewhere else wasn’t the life I wanted.
Goathlands homestead
After I left the Gulf I did not know where to go. For some years I was lost. Nolan’s outback had not answered something for me but had presented me with my biggest question: how was I to make sense of my life? In a boarding house for single men in the southern city of Melbourne I began to write of my uncertainties. Writing seemed my only way forward out of the despair into which I had sunk. Reg Wells made a reader of me, but it was Nolan’s outback that made me a writer.
2010
EXCERPT FROM
Watching the Climbers on the Mountain
As the stockman squatted in the shade against the darkness of the beefwood, so still he would have been invisible to anyone passing, an afternoon cicada chorus began to scream suddenly, without warning, as if triggered by some mysterious alarm. The tide of noise rose and swept the hot and silent bush with oscillating waves of shrill intensity, passing back and forth and rising in layers upon itself until the sound reverberated inside the stockman’s skull. The invisible insects flooded the enthralled afternoon.
A few minutes later the cicadas ceased their signalling as abruptly as they had begun it. In the deep shadows of the beefwood the stockman shifted his weight. Fragments of high-spirited shouts and laughter began to reach him from the direction of the creek. He rose slowly to his feet and moved back in the direction of the cattle track. There was a look of unhappy resignation on his face as he made his way towards the swimming party, and just before going down the creek bank he glanced back once over his shoulder at the dry level country spread out behind him. A trace of intense emotion resonated within him, but it was rapidly being overlaid by anxieties about the fight tomorrow evening—there was a dumb regret in him that he had not, after all, found a way to avoid that.
1988
How to Kill Wild Horses
It was a regulation two-man quarters. A bed each side of the door, and between them just space enough for a small three-drawer chest. There was nothing else, except nails driven into the wooden frame. An electric light bulb hung by a flex from the middle beam of the ceiling. Above the chest of drawers was a single-pane window that could be swung in or out. Outside was a three-foot verandah and two steps to the ground. Where the path carried on from the hut it passed a tin lavatory and ended at a hen run, in which there were a dozen White Leghorns.
Milky unrolled his swag and started putting his things away in the drawers. From the thin shade of a mimosa bush, two chained blue dogs watched his movements. When he’d finished he lay down on the bunk and stared up at the naked pink gecko that had suckers on its feet. The lizard returned his stare, blinking now and again. He wondered if it was waiting for him to close his eyes so that it could drop on him. But it yawned and swallowed as if it were sleepy itself, so he decided it was just passing the time like himself. Waiting. He could feel the heat coming through the fibro walls and the sweat trickled over his body. He lay still. The hens next door were making small troubled sounds and everything seemed to be waiting. In the distance a flock of black birds were going aah-aah-aaaaaah, as if they were suffering a bitter grief. Through the open door he could see where the bank of the creek went down. There was a big aluminium windmill on the far side, but it wasn’t turning. And beyond that there was the dull silver plain, mile after mile of featureless spear grass. Far away, beyond the plain, the hills rose out of the mirage, grey and mysterious. Perhaps even cool. He would be going there with Mr Kelly to look for wild horses.
He closed his eyes—it was like being wrapped in warm pastry—and dreamed of being stalked across the silver plain by an insistent and sinister emu. The dogs woke him, barking and lashing the dust with their chains. He sat up and looked out the window. Coming up the road, which twisted through the dark wild lime trees, was a white Holden ute. He watched it. Behind the ute a horse float swayed through the pall of dust, like the prow of an unexpected ship breasting a grim fog. His heart beat faster and he wondered if he should go and meet the man or wait. He got up and went to the door. A hundred yards away the station homestead stood squarely on its stilts, green and white blinds drawn down over the verandahs and heat radiating off its shiny tin roof. The ute came on past the homestead towards the hut, swaying and jolting and driving the dogs into a frenzy. It pulled up in the dust next to the verandah and a short thin man stepped out. The dogs were silent, watching him intently. Milky went down the steps to meet him.
‘G’day, I’m Milky,’ he said.
‘Moran Kelly,’ the man said, and offered his hand. He was in his middle forties, a good half-head shorter than Milky, his face lined and brown and with a two-day growth of beard on his chin. Milky watched him unload his horse. They were a matched pair, man and horse, both short and scruffy. Liberated from the float, and without halter or bridle, the mare stood alert, watching Moran Kelly while he unloaded the rest of his gear from the back of the ute. Milky felt like an unwelcome observer of these proceedings so he went back inside the hut and sat on the edge of his bed. Perhaps Mr Kelly had not expected him to be there.
There was a brilliant moon that night, and Milky lay awake listening to the sharp sounds that carried through the still air. The dogs whined and snuffled in their dreams and the steady munching of Moran’s horse stayed close to the hut. When they’d gone over to the house for a meal that evening, Reg Moffatt, Milky’s boss, had asked Moran if he would mind Milky going with him on the hunt. Moran Kelly had not appeared enthusiastic but had shrugged and said, ‘Why not?’ They’d left it at that. Moran lay sleeping in the bed opposite. On the chest of drawers six metal clips lay in a black heap, the moonlight coldly outlining them against the scarred surface of the wood. Milky had watched him carefully file the points off sixty bullets and press them into their spring-loaded beds. He was not a man who made you feel like asking a lot of questions.
They rode across the river at first light and headed out across the spear-grass plain towards the hills, which looked closer and more twisted than they had during the heat of the previous day. Milky rode behind on the old brown gelding they called Beau. Beau rolled his head from side to side as he walked, lurching and swaying like an old barge anchored in a swell; not exactly a top-class pony. Beau had once been a gun horse, however, and knew what this was all about. Moran rode ahead, a dirty little hat perched on his head and his rifle slung over one shoulder. He was not an impressive sight.
Milky didn’t see a living thing, and although Moran raised his hand once and seemed to point over to the left, Milky didn’t see anything that you would point at. After nearly two hours of travelling in a straight line they started coming into a bit of low scrub which was crisscrossed with deep breakaway gullies, impossible to travel through without knowing the way. They followed a cattle pad through this maze, sliding and lurching down the steep erosions on one side and struggling and grunting their way up the other. Moran’s pony stuck his head into it and did the job firmly and squa
rely. Beau farted and sighed and staggered about as if he might go down at any minute, but somehow he managed to breast each gully without actually coming to grief. Emerging from a particularly engrossing gully, Milky suddenly found himself among trees and for a moment he lost sight of Moran. Beau pulled up short, sensing the uncertainty of his rider, then waggled his head impatiently just as Milky caught sight of Moran moving ahead of them through the stunted ironbarks. The ground was rocky now, strewn about with great basalt boulders and lesser stones which tinkled under the horses’ hoofs, a dry sound that carried in the morning air like the ringing of a small handbell.
They began the ascent, following the line of a ridge that dipped and rose and meandered deeper into the hills, climbing all the time until you could look back and see the miles of spear grass spreading out below, flat and still as far as the eye could see, cut by the irregular line of the river which arced out deep into the plain as if it had gone exploring.
They followed the ridge for maybe an hour and at last they came to a saddle, where Moran stopped among the trees and waited for Milky to catch up. Milky would have ridden into the grassy clearing, for a better view of what lay ahead, had Moran not motioned him to his side beneath the overhanging branches of a soft wild cherry tree. The hill fell away steeply in front of them, ending in a tangle of rocks and fallen timber at the river far below. Beyond the river more hills rose up, ridge upon ridge of grey and silent forest, like gigantic waves in a petrified ocean. Below them an eagle drifted across the narrow valley, turning his head from side to side, casting his gaze into the grassy pockets that dotted the riverbank at uncertain intervals. In one of those pockets Milky saw something move, sunlight catching the flank of a beast as it emerged from the shadow of the trees. He looked at Moran, but the man was rolling a cigarette.