Shearers' Motel

by Roger McDonald

  ‘Still there, Cookie?’

  The line crackled.

  ‘Still here.’

  Bertram Junior seemed to be gazing down at him. Across the hisses and clicks of long distance he seemed to be narrowing his eyes and wondering if the new cook was going to be the sort of person who had been put on this earth to disappoint him. His words of goodbye were so soft, so remote, that he barely existed through them.

  ‘See you on the day, then.’

  OBLIGING THE COUNTRY

  It was high summer, a scorching February Sunday when he walked across the lawns of Leopardwood Downs homestead far to the northwest of Bourke — rusty garden sprinkler spitting, satellite dish staring up at the sky, no one answering his shouted, ‘Anyone home?’

  The sun blazed overhead like a nuclear pile. His hat smelt like a dirty sock. His body was sticky, itchy, tired. The tyres of his old yellow truck, sunk into the sand, gave out a hot, desolate, perished rubber odour, heat-waves ballooning from the bodywork. The impression he had, glancing back at the vehicle, was of disintegrating materials only just holding together. A split in his hat admitted a hot bar of sunlight onto his scalp. His eyeballs felt like pinpoint charred coals and he wanted to slide down into what shade there was. He had left his leather belt at home and his trousers were held up by an elasticised octopus clip, the kind he used to hold his truck tarp down. It kept slipping off his work trousers and cutting into the bare skin under his khaki shirt as he walked around looking for someone, anyone.

  He came to a cool, green, wirescreened verandah along the side of the house. He wondered what the etiquette was here. He had proved reliable up to this point. He had got himself there, navigating thirteen hundred kilometres on a bearing that would ultimately have touched the continent dead centre if he hadn’t taken a rough turn-off about twenty kilometres back. He was far out on the ocean of land. Now he wanted to mark his arrival, otherwise he was only a fleck in a mirage of his own making.

  The flywire doors of the homestead were unlatched — the crackle of a UHF transmitter came from somewhere inside, and other small sounds: the click of insects texturing the heat, twin deep freezes humming against a wall. On a canvas deckchair lay a paperback book, Man and His Symbols. It was turned face down halfway through. Nothing else. Not even a dog to attack strangers. Not even a decent symbolic feeling that might have come over him if the place had been grander, older, in which case he would have accelerated past the front door without coming in, knowing exactly where he stood (symbolically) in the opposition of worker and owner in the strategies of the Australian ethos.

  Nobody anywhere. He wanted to go inside and pour himself a glass of iced water, and maybe never come out, just spread his elbows on the gold-flecked Formica kitchen tabletop, drop his head, fall asleep. The underside of his eyelids felt as if they were lined with felt, spread with ground glass. In his mouth was the taste of dust and ashes: he felt burnt out at the limit of his existence.

  Yesterday morning he had left a tin-roofed farmhouse far to the south of here — Sharon, his wife, and his three daughters hardly stirring in their sleep as they said goodbye. Then while he was out at the truck tying down the last of his load they woke up more, stumbled from bed and huddled in jumpers, stamping their feet in the chill, hugging themselves in the greyness of first light. Marie and Ella told him to speed it up, they wanted to get back to bed. The youngest, Irene, howled because she wanted to go too — ‘Why not?’ — and clung to his trouser leg. Sharon brought him a mug of tea and they stood looking at each other over the steaming rims. Well, there was more to this going away than met the eye. The talk of money. The talk of returning to the country of his childhood. It wasn’t the full story. The promises made about trying out the work, then coming home again, not somehow wandering off the edge of the map — like men had a habit of doing, Sharon knew well enough, when they reached his age, ruining themselves and making their families miserable in the process. It had to be watched. Sharon wasn’t blind — she was just a little confused about what she was left holding. There was something unexplained in the air, evasive — had been for a long time. What did it all add up to? Everything was here that she loved. He said he loved it too — the farm she had built up from neglect while he got on with his writing, improving the pastures, selecting the stock, making mistakes, then scoring successes. Her old Nissan Patrol stank of sick sheep dragged from the paddocks, of spilt jetting mixes and dust. It had school exercise books trodden into the flooring and ice-block sticks and lolly wrappers in layers under the seats. But it was also a big, warm cabin when they drove home late, half-drunk after dinner parties and country dances, drifting over the frosty hills, and she slid across to him while he did the driving, and it seemed this was all they wanted together, all they needed.

  At last he really was ready to go, and everyone piled into the cab of the truck, a jumble of warm bodies, and rode up to the second gate.

  Then he took the cool, pre-autumnal, misty dawn track away — across sheep paddocks dotted with poplars. In a ground mist a flock of starlings formed a perfect heart collapsing into the tatters of a pine windbreak. It was a reversed image of emotion. He was leaving a house, making a break, following a pattern he barely understood. He only knew it was happening; that he was making it happen, and was going, and if he didn’t there was a kind of death he would face, he couldn’t name what it was.

  Money was what he talked about most when giving reasons for packing his truck and heading out west like this, to do work he had never done in his life before. A total of one thousand dollars a week. It was possible. No small farmer earned as much from wool. What writer earned it from writing? A thousand (or more) was what a shearers’ cook could earn in a big shed by ‘going contract’. That was what he had learned by phoning Alastair Crown, the contractor. ‘The big sheds don’t come round every time. But of course when they do, it’s the reputable cooks that get them.’ He would start on the basic rate of $428.20 per week and work his way up from there. ‘If you’re a good man,’ said Alastair, ‘I can use you. Too bloody right.’

  He thought he was a good man in that sense.

  ‘Then go for it,’ said Alastair.

  As the life he knew dropped away behind him, he knew he wasn’t really doing this for money, but was cutting loose, pissing off, piling on the logs, fanning a conflagration. Money was just something that could be talked about (like melons were something that could be talked about).

  The feeling he had when he closed the gate of the home paddock seemed a reason in itself. The heart of starlings settled in their tattered pines as if sucked down by a magnetic force. He made his way down the long dirt track, out to the steaming black tarmac of the King’s Highway. The feeling made him come alive — he was being drawn to half-remembered places. Grasshoppers slapped the windscreen. The balding tyres twanged. The speeding cylinders hissed like a bow wave cleaving a sea. He had an image of ruin in his mind, as if he would be travelling into, and through, the sun. The names of the towns at the far end of the road he took — Nyngan, Byrock, Bourke, Fords Bridge, Yantabulla, Hungerford — rose towards him from a time in his childhood when he first became aware of change and separation in his life. He had lived out west as a boy, and had said to his mother, ‘If I die in Bourke, don’t bury me there’.

  Alastair had said: ‘That’s where you’ll get your start’.

  Arrived at Leopardwood Downs Station he knew without being told, without even looking (though he looked), that he came from the same background, had attended the same schools, had existed within the same social network since childhood as the people who ran this place. He wanted them to see that, then wanted to watch himself turning invisible against this background of his choosing. Then he would be able to say, I remember who I am. And I choose what happens next.

  He walked back to the truck feeling like first arrival on the scene after a flying saucer attack. Bertram Junior’s telephoned directions had been exact till now: for the last twenty kilometres follow the graded t
rack leading straight to the homestead. Near the house was a cluster of outbuildings — a corrugated iron fuel shed, a machinery shed, and a vehicle shed standing on oilstained, ochrecoloured sand — but no shearing shed. He shaded his eyes and scanned the horizon. Not even a glimmer of galvanised iron showed through the distant trees.

  He gave the homestead a last try, walking around the other side past a neat, wirescreened meat house, and along the front where recently planted bottlebrush and juvenile orange trees battled the full blast of heat. The front was never the way you entered in the country. The back was always the front.

  This homestead was a modular house. It would have been shipped up on the back of a semitrailer, bolted together, and wrapped around with gauzed verandahs to give it an illusion of spaciousness. It was raised on half-metre-high concrete blocks, with a Zincalum roofline serving fibreglass rainwater tanks. A struggle was being lost to make the yard an oasis. The place to shelter that day would have been an inside bedroom, shades drawn, doors closed against grit and glare. An air conditioner was running. Maybe someone was in there now, ignoring his shout, leafing through another book of a kind he wouldn’t expect to find here, unless there was a student around, an art student maybe. They were the ones who read up on symbols, their teachers telling them to look around behind things in order to escape the literal three-dimensional world. But they shouldn’t need to be told that here in the bush.

  It was the day before shearing and he supposed that all available hands would be down at the shed: men, boys, women, girls, dogs — whoever. But where was the shed?

  He headed off along a station track, following deep, slithery wheel-ruts into a paddock of bleached grass, where kangaroos lounged in clumps of shade. Raised on elbows, they gazed at him like sunbathers. After a couple of kilometres he came to an airstrip with a small Cessna parked at the far end. It was poised to float up into a different medium from the afflicted ground, where fallen mulga logs, ant beds, and black clumps of impenetrable woody weeds would make emergency landings suicidal.

  Turning around, he drove back. He was wound up to a pitch of excitement he hadn’t felt for years. What was going on with him? He felt untested. He wanted to be taken on as a stranger on terms that had nothing to do with the life he had left behind him. That was his idea in going cooking. That was it. And he wanted it to happen soon. Then he would be able to look over at himself, and join himself, instead of feeling divided in his feelings all the time. All these tracks splitting off from each other were like him. They would finally dribble out in senseless terminations of impulse. Was he out to get himself lost, slightly crazed and panicky on a geographical scale? The country made the invitation and people obliged with their lives.

  He struck a well-used branch track following a fenceline, and a sign dangling from the reverse side of a gate: Leopardwood Downs Shed 7.5 kilometres. He’d missed it the first time through. His pots and pans, sifters, knives, measuring jugs and bottles rattled around in the back. Something beautiful happened then. The truck slalomed through a spectral near-desert landscape that looked, for a while, untouched by sheep. Here were leopardwood trees, graceful, dreamlike, slender; and bloodwoods, with distinctively shining leaf-heads standing out from the darker jumble of rotting logs and ant beds, prickly scrub and brooding acacias. It was a landscape he remembered from when he came up from Bourke on roads like this with his father, driving ‘on patrol’ through Fords Bridge to Hungerford, back down to Wanaaring, out to White Cliffs, on through Cobar and home to Bourke again. They made campfires of gidgee logs under red sandridges scattered with scarlet tongues of Sturt’s desert pea, boiling the billy and heating tins of Spam on the coals. They had all their shiralee moments together on these tracks. The dark eye of the pea was careless where it looked. Part of who he was today was still the boy there, commenting on everything, imagining into life what he couldn’t understand, and shrinking with embarrassment when his father chose the fullest moments to speak, quoting homilies on solitude, overstating plain feeling under the stars. The boy was amazed when his father drained shandies and accepted whiskies and soda from station owners on wide verandahs after sunset. He must once have led a different life, maybe even a wilder life before he became a Presbyterian minister — because the boy thought only Catholic clergy drank (the priest always disappearing into the public bar of Fitz’s pub). At Brewarrina, he remembered, they camped in the ghostly, broken-into church, clearing their stretchers and blankets out of the way in time for a morning service. No one had come (the Presbyterians had gone to seed in Brewarrina), and his father had spoken a prayer with just the two of them present. It made the skin crawl on the back of the boy’s neck: ‘Dear God, grant us a full life in continuation of the times we have known in Thy loving care’. They drove back to Bourke, the boy steering while his father rolled cigarettes. In his late forties now, he was ten years older than his father had been then. Another ten years, and his father would be diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. At the age he was now his father was an invalid. It sharpened his appetite for life to think of that.

  He had driven through Bourke earlier that same morning, searching for the old house, the Presbyterian manse in Mertin Street, finding (after going round the block twice) that it had been demolished to make way for a Budget motel. He hardly slowed as he went past. The old coolabah tree in the front yard, a ladder to the stars, was gone. The church paddock was gone. The tin sheds where he played with his brothers were gone. The storeroom was gone where they picked locks and prised lids from pine boxes of straw-packed non-alcoholic communion wine, and sat around guzzling it like winos. It was his first time back in almost forty years, and suddenly he only wanted to find someone to sell him a truckload of watermelons. At a corner store on the North Bourke road he learned that no one was growing watermelons at present; so he phoned an order through to a North Bourke irrigation farmer for boxes of rockmelons, graded for developing ripeness, to come out to Leopardwood Downs on the midweek mail truck.

  CHOSEN

  His first shed: a rectangular steel-framed box raised above the ground on metal piles. It was like an elevated machinery workshop. Steel yards were packed with sheep. Plumes of dust drifted across a cobalt sky. Everything edible was long gone, the ground bare red except for sparse clumps of low spiky herbage and stands of drooping acacia.

  Half a kilometre past the shed were the shearers’ quarters. For a long moment, there at the gate, he stood staring, taking a deep dry rasping breath. This would be his home now. The huts. No need for imagination to do any more work. Here he was. Cookie. No one else was engaged for the job. If the shearing team didn’t like him they could sack him, and he would nose off into the bush somewhere and camp.

  The huts looked as if they came from army disposals. They would have been the latest in prefabricated shelters some time around World War II — broad vertical corrugations darkened with time, forming a steely wedge. The inverted ‘v’ of the roofline smouldered in the afternoon heat. Kites spiralled overhead in a thermal. Three bedroom doors to a side, making six in all. Kitchen at the end. Corrugated iron chimney. New cement water tank on a high stand.

  A sound of hammering drew him to the shed first. Two Yamaha farm bikes were propped near a side door. Yellow-eyed kelpies growled from under a Suzuki ute. He went inside to make himself known, entering through an engine room, stumbling up a set of oilstained wooden steps, eyes adjusting to the gloom.

  Here was where the business of the country was conducted. Wool would be cut from sheep, carried a few metres along a greasy floor to a slotted table, sorted into lines, thrown into bins, pressed into dense, two-hundred-kilogram bales that would be rolled out through a back door and on to the tray of a semitrailer, and then trucked to the railhead at Bourke. There was no other reason for anyone being here, other than this factory process in the bush. No reason for sheep or people to be in this country at all, except for this.

  The hammering continued. In one of the holding pens he found a slightly built, brown-eyed, ac
tive young woman wearing dusty jeans and a smudged white shirt, with a battered, chewed Akubra tipped back on her head. He liked the look of her, but thought she would have no truck with symbolism. She didn’t look like an art student. She was down on her knees with a hammer and nails. From one ear dangled an earring in the shape of a steer’s head. Someone was under the floor. ‘That’s my brother down there,’ the young woman smiled. The brother’s voice introduced itself. He was Maurice Holgate, the owner. They were involved in last minute repairs, nailing down flooring and closing gaps in the underside of the shed. Too much daylight through the floorboards would distract the sheep when shearing started. He caught a glimpse of a sun-reddened face and weathered, smiling eyes against a sea of dark sheepshit under the shed.

  Maurice Holgate spoke with a high-speed nasal delivery. There was near-panic at Leopardwood Downs. It was the same all over sheep country the day before shearing. The arrival of the shearing team with its unknown quantities was the main event of the year. The three weeks of shearing was when wool was converted to money. It was a race against variables. Everyone played their part — the cook included. Everyone was a potential disaster — the cook included. Not even owners could trust themselves during shearing. Not even genial nice guys like this hammer-wielding Maurie Holgate with his doubts and worries. Some small thing could easily set him off and before he knew it he would explode and find himself badmouthing a shearer face to face, and everyone would then go into a huddle, shearers, rouseabouts, shed hands, cooks, a whole team maybe getting on the track, pissing off on the Leopardwood Downs wool clip. Cars would go roaring out to the main road in clouds of bitter dust, and the next day, while phones rang hot round the country in an attempt to scrape together another lot of workers, it would rain for the first time in a year, and wet sheep and boggy tracks would make the whole thing an impossibility.