In the early weeks, when they’d first started, Slim saw the mailman hand over a packet of letters and Buckler bringing them to his nose, perfume-wafting-wise.
‘Something sentimental going on,’ Slim deduced, ‘in the old father’s trousers.’
Yes, Buckler was hooked. There was power in a name he couldn’t help uttering: ‘Rusty Donovan, I call her Red.’ A great big idiot, he sighed over talismanic hieroglyphs – misspellings, ill-educated blots and scratches, the veined creekbeds of pressed rose petals.
Those were the times when away from the hullabaloo Buckler stumbled on something so beautiful it stunned him to humility – ‘Men, come and look!’ – a striped rock, a desert hakea blooming, the skin of a snake. His mind coiled round that Rusty Donovan and back at the camp he reached for his pen. A young married woman, her husband a violent man, Buckler had taken his chances.
Two weeks later they crossed paths with Charlie, the mailman, and Buckler looked sour. She’d thanked him for his trouble, prompt but hardly effusive like once upon a time, when she loved love.
But Buckler went on – hammering away at his heart, or was it his balls, in the instance of Rusty Donovan, formerly Mrs Hoppy Harris, formerly of Broken Hill, now of Adelaide.
A red track emerged from scattered bush either side of a T-junction heaped with windblown sand. The gaunt, burnt branches of a tree marked the spot with a piece of tin hanging from a length of wire. Buckler had been there years before heading west for a rendezvous with work and stamped his initials and the date, with latitude and longitude references exact, on the lid of an old kerosene drum and hung it up. The whole lot was still there, smoothly rusted and creaking like a gallows.
The jolting truck declared a fuel problem and choked to a stop. While Buckler bled fuel lines looking for the blockage, his pair crawled under the tailgate and snored.
Kangaroos in the heat of day as they raised their snouts were like shadowed human observers. They angled from the lying position and showed their perversely watchful faces. Then, in the same hypnotising way – right there on the track to nowhere – certain individuals emerged from the mass of land. A breeze kept the sound of a second vehicle to a murmur until dust made it obvious two miles away.
‘Who’s that?’ said Slim, cranked up on an elbow.
‘Must be someone,’ said Buckler, shading his eyes to see the plume of an approaching transport.
An American Blitz wagon like their own but carrying a dozen men and boys stopped a short way off.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Buckler.
The young, slouch-hatted blackfellows were half-dressed in singlets and khaki shorts, toes hanging over the tailgate. Their leader, tantalising with native diplomacy, allowed a minute to elapse with the engine switched off before he stepped down. Then Buckler recognised him: the nuggety old soldier, Adrian de Grey, wearing corporal’s stripes and in charge of a construction detail.
‘Last place I’d expect to find a legend,’ said de Grey when he eyed Buckler over.
‘Ditto,’ said Buckler, offering his hand.
In crisp army style de Grey ordered his boys to make camp and they jumped to the job.
That evening as the sun boiled into redness and the rickety shadows of mulga lengthened over a purpling plain, Buckler stalked imagined boundaries in his well-oiled and ferociously dusty boots. Away from the crossroads there was no edge. There were webs holding yellow coral-backed spiders in suspension between thorn bushes. There were dingo howls and shooting stars. In the coming dark he fancied meeting a man eye to eye and engaging him hand to hand, gristle to bone, clasp knife to scrotal sac. Slim worked it all out. The returned man’s festering drive, the fascist solution of one and one, the disinclination to share what had been rhetorically bought by blood for the sake of the all. Knowing Buckler’s attitudes, Slim didn’t have to ask what de Grey was doing out this far on a mustering camp of Eureka. He said they were roo shooting away from their main camp but there was a definite impression of a meeting being sought. De Grey would be wanting to know what Buckler’s troublemaking propensities were, around this unit he’d put together with pride and wariness of acceptance of colour.
Buckler came down the line and saw de Grey’s boys turning away from him. So de Grey had said something about Buckler to his team, that he hated blacks.
That night, pressure lamps hissing, there were two camps under the stars. Abe cooked for both. Buckler looked over at de Grey’s lot as they slurped on mulligatawny soup and chewed fresh damper from the camp oven. Dehydrated vegetables were served, mashed dried peas and sauerkraut, and a fatty cold mutton they hungrily eyed when Abe unwrapped it from a sugar bag and flourished his carving blade.
By the light of the camp fire Buckler gave de Grey a pointer on the nutritional shortcomings of his race: ‘Abe is correcting it with his grub.’
De Grey curtly thanked him and went off into the dark to find his swag.
‘Suit y’self, digger,’ Buckler mumbled into his cocoa.
He worked on irritation, eyes sweeping the dark following infantry patrol routines unpractised in a while. Blow on certain resentments. Keep them bright. Watch men who moved as shadows. De Grey’s band was rather too Australian for Buckler’s taste, taking too much for granted. Look how de Grey came in from nowhere, he griped to Slim, his transport loaded with mere boys holding army-issue Lee Enfields. Buckler recalled de Grey’s words back on the troopship Taranaki in ’19, a pique against land taken without kindness from native inhabitants. De Grey already had his place in history, gloriously rained on him at Dernancourt and Villers-Bret. What more did he want? ‘But the man’s a fucking marvel,’ Buckler conceded.
A cowboy song with a plaintive kick could be heard from de Grey’s camp. It came with an eerie hum. Inland Australia was a country of spirits, make no mistake. Buckler surrendered himself to the second-rank listening. The blackies were plugged into spirit way up to their tangled eyebrows. The bush itself took on their shapes. When the songs ended Buckler heard them swishing a branch, calling and laughing. They never slept at night without brushing the sand around their fires for fear of the devil man. They worked it smooth as a bowling alley and Buckler thought they were dated but understood their urge. He’d do it himself against them because Adrian de Grey was smarter than piss – knew the outback was not quite the realm of the white man yet. You didn’t have to ask him. It was still to be won. Otherwise he wouldn’t be serving this time round making his push for possession wearing government-issue khakis.
In the night Buckler’s thoughts went spiralling down until he groaned in his sleep, waking boys fifty yards away like a bull seal yawping on an icefloe. It was a wonderful concern, the army. You could be the definition of its meaning and for that very reason you were made a ragbag supervisor.
Next morning, talking of maps, de Grey showed Buckler a silk handkerchief with an excellent map of Australia printed on it with technical detail exact. ‘What do you think of it?’
‘Good.’
‘Make of Nippon,’ grinned the soldier.
‘That good-looking kid in your lot,’ said Buckler, ‘the one who’d like to think I didn’t exist, he’s Birdy Pringle’s Hammond, isn’t he?’
‘That’s Hammond all right. Proved a bit of a runaway but we nabbed him good.’
Buckler’s truck needed a tow and they chained it behind de Grey’s. It was another day’s drive to Eureka homestead where a blacksmith’s shop and a mechanic on the payroll promised repairs. Faces grinned at Buckler’s dependence while he jolted in the passenger seat and tried to doze with his arms folded tight. Only one face, that boy Hammond’s, kept itself turned away.
They came out into a vast dusty bowl with ancient hills behind them, crossed sand ridges, skirted a salt lake crusted with red-stained rime, plugged on through saltbush and arrived at the station, which loomed in a mirage of galvanised iron pavilions long before
they debouched like gypsies with the reek of diesel in their baggy trousers, and stamped their boots.
They crossed an open width of ground under the hot sun wearing their slouch hats with leather chinstraps fitted. When Slim observed Buckler and Abe marching in step beside him, he gave a skip and the three of them were crisply aligned.
Then behind them de Grey’s boys fell in, and de Grey was heard grunting ‘hep, hep, hep right hep’.
‘Look at the half-arse army,’ said a watcher in the shade, and Buckler couldn’t help it, he bridled at any slur on the band.
Eureka was five million acres give or take a few hundred thou, epitomising the old continent worn down and reduced to whatever nutrition could be wrung out in the name of sheep. It had a stone homestead with a wide paved verandah and a stone shearing shed architecturally huge under a sheet-iron roof. On average thirty shearers shore one hundred thousand sheep fed on saltbush that sprouted past all horizons. While a war went on somewhere, and our men were in it, a noted Australian battle was continued here between man and truculent beast, between men and men in the realm of boss relations. One of those fighters was Hoppy Harris from Broken Hill.
‘Harris the contractor?’ said Buckler, his mouth going a little dry.
‘So you’ve heard of me?’ smiled the hairy fellow oiling his handpiece.
There were only four shearers present, and the jackaroo Randolph Knox doing the work of ten, sweeping, skirting, fleece-rolling and pressing, wool piled on every side like mountain ranges. Harris roared over the engine noise, ‘I can’t speak to you now, you can see I’m fucking flat strap shorthanded. Unless you happen to know your way round a fleece, push off.’
Despite the forceful language Harris eyed Buckler neutrally enough, perhaps only indicative of what he reserved for everyone he met. But whatever went on under the look was perhaps something else, on the theory that men suspicious of each other in the realm of sexual betrayal were inevitably polite until tactics declared otherwise.
Buckler being of rank was welcomed a mile away at the big house where there were linen tablecloths, silver cutlery, napkin rings and a saddle of mutton accompanied by hermitage wine from the Barossa Valley, the bottles packed in sheaths of straw with the heads of wheat still on them. Buckler had sherry with the manager, Oakeshott. The jackaroo Knox entered wet-haired and breathless as the clock struck seven, and Oakeshott and his wife eyed him for manners and to be sure, when he was invited to remove his jacket, that his shirt was buttoned to the wrists, covering the yolk boils on his forearms from too much delving in wool. Randolph Knox had the biggest jaw Buckler had ever seen on a bloke, like a sack of marbles. They sat in chairs with carved backs. This Knox, Buckler realised, was the Head Boy of Colts’s school, the former schoolboy cricketing great – how the mighty were averaged, Buckler reflected, removed from their marvellous contexts, smitten with boils and made into anxious apprentices.
That night the men took over huts almost empty of station workers. De Grey and his band had their blankets unrolled under the stars.
Oakeshott took Buckler riding early. He said he was tolerant of de Grey’s coons for the sake of the war push. The two riders seemed to be going nowhere with the dawn light on their backs until they came upon relics undisturbed since the overland telegraph penetrated last century. Old huts with rifle slits, rusted horseshoes dangling from white-anted boards, eaten away iron pots, amber rum bottles tumbled in heaps.
Buckler said, ‘Nothing to show the white man has any more claim on the dirt than the little yellow bastard brandishing his sword from Timor.’
‘Except we’re here,’ said Oakeshott.
‘Je suis d’accord.’
‘And look at our field of fire. Three hundred and sixty degrees and cleaner than the veldt.’
Oakeshott was a noted woolgrower and eminent sheep classer with reason to reflect on achievement but personally liverish. Each morning the jackaroos were given their day’s jobs with barking precision. Stations were run as monarchies and, with his drooping moustache and silvered Pickelhaube haircut, Oakeshott added despotism. He wasn’t an owner – that was a pastoral company in Adelaide with directors who interfered. What Oakeshott held was the hereditary impact he’d made on strong-woolled merino sheep over a lifetime of attentive breeding. When he retired his line would be spent unless he found a worthy successor. Young Randolph Knox, he confided, could be the one.
Back at the house tea and scones were served by Mrs Oakeshott’s Martha, a girl around the age of Birdy Pringle’s Dorothy, but luckier than her because she had these good people civilising her in a lace mob-cap and pinafore.
Over to the men’s camp Buckler went to make himself felt. All was in order and he thanked Jack Slim.
‘Bugger thanking me, it was de Grey.’
The truck was unloaded, gear stacked, and de Grey and his lads were at the shed with Harris, helping with the shearing now their own work was done, all except one worker – the lean boy who kept his distance as if by reverse magnetism. When Buckler walked around the end of the men’s quarters verandah, the boy sloped off around the other so that Buckler only saw his legs. Then through a window Hammond Pringle could be seen sitting on a tool trunk cleaning his rifle.
Abe had the kitchen range going. In a side room Slim had the radio set up.
‘You two have fallen on your feet,’ said Buckler. ‘I’d call it over-comfortable. Won’t be for long.’
‘What have you got for me in the way of loot?’ said Slim. ‘Anything special?’
‘Oakeshott’s a good man. I haven’t pressured him yet.’
Slim said, ‘It’s all right supporting the war effort but better if your neighbour does it, and there are few exceptions to that golden rule not excluding managers protecting their patch for the sake of city slickers. Have I got that right, Major?’
‘Something like it.’
‘Here’s my selection,’ said Slim, handing Buckler a list he’d made after poking around in the Eureka sheds.
‘That’s not a lot either,’ said Buckler.
‘Prime stores,’ agreed Slim. ‘Pastoralists pay peanuts, but when it comes to gear they really know how to stint.’
‘Get over the resentment factor, Lenin.’
‘There’s a lorry, a pump engine, and what about this adaptable trailer with fuel drums strapped on? I think we should grab it. Then we could really go the distance. De Grey thinks so too.’
‘Who’s running this army – corporals?’
‘They say Hitler’s one. We could go for weeks on end,’ said Slim, ‘just think of it.’
Buckler stared through the window at the half-dark boy sitting guard.
He went out to him. ‘Everyone else is at the shearing, why aren’t you lending an elbow, Hammond?’
It was said with a good smile. The boy scrambled to his feet.
‘Wouldn’t know what to make of a sheep,’ he mumbled, looking down at the dirt.
‘Say if it was buffalo hide?’
He looked up.
‘That would be different, sure. No-one’d go up me for leaving cuts.’
‘Seems just yesterday you were skinning them at ten.’
‘I was, and younger. Pop had me working for it.’
Buckler peered inquiringly, sympathetically at the kid.
‘Why didn’t you say it was you, Hammond?’
‘I’ve let ya down.’ He lowered his head.
‘Don’t know anything about that,’ said Buckler, who’d been sending school fees to the Marist Brothers, Townsville, on the quiet, and when it came to priorities, putting Hammond’s share ahead of Colts’s for the simple reason that Buckler thought Presbyterians, because he was baptised one, would stretch understanding further than would the Micks. A recent final demand showed he was wrong.
Buckler summoned Abe to bring them a smoko box
. Hammond picked among the cupcakes and drank tea.
‘You’re a second-chance boy, Hammond. Give it another try, that’s your luck. Us – me, your father, Corporal de Grey, all the good men who came through the first war show – we got it sorted out for you and Colts.’
The kid nodded. ‘I know that bull. There was the time you crawled down a trench and tied a rope round his waist.’
Buckler said, ‘Call it a trench, it was more like a river of mud. Then there was the time he lifted the spar off me, when my legs were jammed. Only they weren’t crushed. Not quite. He got me back walking and I was right as rain. That was Messines.’
‘I grew up on them bits. Like the time he felt the spent shell stroking his face. He talked about that. It landed like a ghost, he said. It would have been curtains in the mud, he would have been pushed in. The mud would have filled his face, but you had the jack and the length of four be two.’
‘Can you imagine it?’
‘Can’t.’
‘We knew worse, Hammond.’
‘I know. He never shuts up about it.’
It made Buckler smile.
In the stillness came a pizzicato of crickets and men snoring with cello richness. Over several nights Buckler waited for the visit from Hoppy Harris. Percussion would come with the crunch of boots on gravel. At meals the atmosphere between them, their nodding politeness, started working on him through gaps of hefty silence. Someone wasn’t eating. A fellow insomniac stood out in the dark smoking. Shape of that contractor under the stars.
Buckler didn’t think Harris a man to negotiate or yarn. He was one who waited to strike a blow against the most satisfying material to hand, a wrongdoer in the flesh. Judgement circling closer tightened the fist and waited till work was done.
When Colts Ran Page 5