Shearers' Motel

by Roger McDonald

  Driving across from the shearing shed to the shearers’ quarters, backing the truck up to a set of wooden steps, climbing out and wiping his sweaty palms down the sides of his trousers, he decided he would have been better off arriving earlier, maybe yesterday. Maybe never. On the last leg from Bourke he’d deliberately eased back on the accelerator, wanting to slide in unobtrusively, having the truck parked in the shade of the kitchen, unpacked and ready before anyone else got there.

  In the quarters he could see a shadow moving around. He had heard the rule in shearers’ lore: the cook had exclusive claim to room of his choice. So he hefted his bag into the bedroom closest to the kitchen (wire-framed collapsible bed, stained, striped mattress, lumpy pillow, and bush-carpentered plywood side table), and returned to the truck. Unstrapping the tarp, selecting a box of kitchen utensils, he felt his legs shaking. Four and a half hours to get a meal ready for nine people. Already it was past two; tea was at six-thirty. He hoped no one would come. He just wanted to piss off, keep going. But he had no excuse. His own fault if he made a mess of this. How could he fail to?

  At the top of the steps he was greeted by a heat-worried, fair-haired woman in her thirties holding a paint pot. He squeezed past her, dumped his armload of goods on the dining table, and introduced himself.

  ‘The cook.’ He spread his palms.

  ‘I’m Judy Holgate.’ She set a finger to her cheek, eyed the man up and down, and asked, ‘Have you cooked before?’

  ‘Not in sheds, no.’ (Wishing he didn’t have to say it.)

  ‘So what’s for tea tonight, Cookie?’ She smiled.

  He hitched up his trousers. ‘Dunno.’

  She eyed his boxes of extra foodstuffs — herbs, yeasts, sauces — as she resumed her painting. ‘They’re like killer ants, they just work their way through what you put there. They’ve drunk a lot and smoked a lot of cigarettes in their time, and the old gut doesn’t want too much of the bitey stuff. You know, you shouldn’t go to too much trouble for them —’

  ‘No chance,’ he said.

  But he was resolved to go to whatever trouble he wanted to. The shearers were obliged to pay him so much per sheep out of their own pockets, so if he served them artichoke wedges and larks’ tongues on beds of arugula lettuce, and they pelted him with spoons, and drove him from the kitchen, it would be his problem. He almost said, ‘For that matter, why go to the trouble of painting a busted old door?’ Except he knew what was on Mrs Holgate’s mind: ‘Don’t risk our shearers walking out on us’. Because there was a recently-peaked wool boom and graziers were hoping for yet another price rise. It was an industry that rained dollar coins, then went rotten, peak by trough, decade by decade. The Australian economy rode on the sheep’s back. Then it fell off. Too many farmers had been changing over to sheep lately. The national flock was up forty-five per cent. New South Wales alone produced more wool than New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina combined. Shearers were in demand. There was no way to turn wool into money without hired labour. So don’t tempt them to cut up rough, was the unstated warning, even by spoiling them. Shearers were notoriously touchy.

  But so were cooks, he reminded himself. So was Cookie.

  Mrs Holgate finished her painting while he gave his new identity a look round. His first shed. It wasn’t so bad. He felt relief at the reality of doors, ceilings, windows and chairs. He rapped his knuckles on solid things after an excess of anticipation. Obduracy had its uses in the quietening of overheated thoughts. He felt relief that gritty dust and scuff marks, ashes in the fireplace and cobwebs in the corners showed there were jobs to be done.

  He began to get his bearings after the scalded landscape of woody weeds, lignum, and rocky rises he’d encountered since Bourke. Out there the sun had scorched through the windscreen. The sky was too big, the horizon a charred circle that hazed away into the curvature of the earth. Over the last two hundred kilometres he had seen only one other person. It had happened while he was squatting against a sapling at the side of the road, trousers round his ankles. A utility bounced over a low rise, dog in the back, driver studiously ignoring him. He wouldn’t have missed a thing, though. He would have seen the low-slung, yellow-ducoed Holden one-tonner, paint peeling from the sideboards, blue tarp scrunched over a bundle of goods in the back held down with octopus clips. He would have seen a figure struggling with his King Gees. He would have thought to himself: shearers’ cook, for sure — poor desperate bastard shitting his guts out after a hard night in town. (The previous night he had slept between clean sheets in a Narromine motel.)

  The previous day, coming up through the central west, he had called on friends at Koorawatha. They gave him boxes of zucchinis, baby squash, fresh tomatoes, capsicums, and bunches of new onions. He bore these in past the owner’s wife — prime fresh vegetables looking impressively chef’s-kitchen-like in their bulky styrofoam boxes. He had been given a packet of Chux Superwipes: ‘invaluable’. He had never seen them before in his life. He was lent a metre-long potato masher, and given some last-minute advice from the friend who’d been a shearers’ cook twenty-five years before: ‘Don’t forget, angle the saw down the backbone when cutting up your killer. And remember, always put the lunchtime joint on before smoko. If it’s not ready, don’t worry. Finish it on the top of the stove in a baking pan. And —’ the friend hesitated. ‘And good luck,’ he added quietly, doubtfully.

  He put the truck into gear, waved his goodbyes, and bounced off down the dusty track on the thousand kilometres remaining to Leopardwood Downs. The tone of those farewell words worried him. He suspected the friend thought he couldn’t cook. Not things men liked in sheds. The friend saw him as coming from a generation with ruined tastes, who’d shrugged off a childhood excess of roast mutton and boiled vegetables, who could never look at rice pudding without smiling knowingly, and who wouldn’t know how to make a decent custard if his life depended on it (as it might, some day).

  Here was a long, lime-green painted table with two forms on each side. At the far end of the table were stacked eight tightly-taped cardboard boxes from Honeyman’s Store in Bourke. It was the stores order forwarded by Bertram Junior and his brother Harold. The boxes would have to be unpacked and sorted before anyone could use the table. That would take time. Up against the bare boards adjoining the kitchen were three gas refrigerators and a gas freezer. The perishables — fruit, vegetables, eggs, margarine — had already been stacked in the fridges by Mrs Holgate.

  ‘And if there’s anything else you need,’ she said, wiping her hands on a turps-soaked rag, ‘just ask.’

  ‘I will. Don’t worry.’

  Through into the kitchen, then, for a look around. The smell of dry dust, ashes, cold fat. The stillness of cobwebs. The crunch of mouse dirt.

  There was a rickety table, also lime-green, a washing-up sink under a side window, a four-burner gas stove, a big old-fashioned cast-iron range (inoperable), a larger gas stove with all its parts missing, and an ancient flywired cupboard full of broken and stained utensils. Light came from small, square, dusty windows at either end of the room. There was no lighting generator at Leopardwood Downs shed — ceiling-mounted gas mantles served instead. Below the kitchen window, out on the dirt, was the hot water system, a sealed two-hundred-litre steel drum with a fireplace underneath and plumbing leading in several directions in the open air. The fire was out, but when he turned on a tap scalding water disgorged into the sink, spitting steam and coughing like a bullock. The sun alone had heated it to boiling point.

  So this was his first kitchen. He folded his arms and surveyed it. He could feel the job choosing him with its imagery of wreckage. As he opened the flywired cupboard a flutter of rust sailed to the floor. The cupboard was a jumble of broken mincer parts, egg slicers without handles, duplicate potato mashers, ineffective can openers, buckled colanders, coffee mugs without handles.

  Mentally he started making a list of cook’s complaints. If it was true that cooks were notorious whingers, then already he was one. />
  ‘Better to chuck this old junk out than have a door painted, Mrs Holgate — are you there?’ (She was gone.)

  He was alone with himself. Strapping on an apron for the first time in his life, he investigated the pantry. A gust of stale air came back at him when he opened the door. Old yellow newspapers rustled. The shelves were jammed with blackened utensils. Making an eyeball inventory of scaly dishes and pans, he backed off. It was the black hole of kitchenware. A generation of cooks had used the pantry as a dump since VJ Day or earlier. An impression of maniacal frustration overcame him — a vision of tubby, red-faced, trembling and disappointedly drunken cooks hurling buckled baking pans and handleless saucepans, worn mops and holed steel buckets at the walls and leaving them there where they fell. He was at the beginning of a process of frustration. If he started cleaning the pantry there would be no time for anything else. So he closed the door and hooked it shut. Then he just kept moving from one task to another, jerkily, numbly, thinking that this erratic attack on the work he was making would soon settle down, when the job started properly.

  But it was the job, he found.

  THE GRISTLE

  It was five in the afternoon. A ten-ton truck pulling a long, lurching, mud-spattered and dented caravan emerged from the heat-haze behind the shearing shed and surged towards a clump of trees opposite the kitchen. Its roaring progress was slow, probing. He watched through window glass while doing a wash-up of dusty enamel plates and grit-covered crockery. The truck was a bulky twin cab, a six- or eight-seater of the kind used to carry electricity workers out to high-tension powerlines. Two figures were visible up front, a man and a woman. The truck ground slowly past, but he didn’t go to the door. He got on with what he was doing.

  On the stove behind him potatoes were on the boil. On a tin plate in the fridge were two kilos of sausages pricked and ready. He had carried these and some mince all the way from the Braidwood Butchery, keeping the packages chilled in an Esky. He’d been told to expect station meat ready killed, but forgot to ask Maurice Holgate about it. An oiled frying pan stood ready at the side of the stove. Tonight’s menu: fried sausages, potatoes to be served either hot or cold, tinned beetroot and sliced tomatoes on the side. Should he open the five-kilo tin of Gee-Vee pickled cucumbers he’d brought? These were the big questions now. He was no longer a small-time primary producer or a writer selecting phrases with care and frustration. He was Cookie peeling onions with even knife strokes.

  There had been another time in his life when he had stood in a kitchen deciding what to do. It had been almost twenty years ago. He had never cooked until then, except for throwing steak in a pan or peeling a hunk of salami and munching it with bread and cheese while tossing back a beer, a novel or a book of poems propped on the table while he ate. Sharon had done the cooking until then. But then they had their first daughter and he began experimenting with recipe books in the long evening intervals before the baby slept. Close to midnight, the table would be spread with Indonesian or Italian food from Cheap Dishes of the World and Continental Leftovers. Over the years, he had continued this way, doing much of the household cooking. That way he escaped the washing-up. That way he ate when he was hungry. He prided himself on his abilities as an improviser and considered writing a book, A Man’s Book of Scraps. But he had never been tested till now. He had never cooked the sort of food he had been brought up on: Australian food, it was called — meaty, barley-thick, soapscud-grey soups; stringy roast legs of mutton and coarsely baked potatoes; thick yellow custards and heavy steamed puddings.

  Over among the trees a tall, dark-haired woman in jeans and a T-shirt dropped to the ground from the cab of the truck and directed the caravan into position. The sound of the truck engine died, a second figure dropped to the ground. This must be Barbara and Davo, the married couple. Clean Team Alastair Crown had mentioned them when he first spoke about the job. (‘The shearers are Maoris,’ Alastair had said on the phone. ‘But they’re good blokes. Four shearers, two girl rouseabouts. Then there’s a woman classer and her husband. Fine young couple — Davo’s the presser. Only eight to cook for in all, nine counting yourself. A small team, a good start, they’ll make allowances.’)

  The sun poured heat on the western side of the quarters. It was unremitting, even at five-thirty. He kept working, ramming the stores away in the boxes they came in, wedging them into corners of the kitchen and shoving them behind doors. Sorting through their contents might have been like Christmas if it wasn’t for the hurry, the panic, the numbness he felt. Oranges, cauliflowers and pumpkins went into the empty fireplace. He worked in a space that looked like a freight office after a train smash. Jars of jam, cans of baked beans, spaghetti, creamed corn, pie apple, tinned fruit, stacks of toilet paper, packets of steel wool dumped where they fitted. Bottles of chilli and garlic sauce. It was a jumble, but he intended to get properly organised soon — maybe in the cool of the evening, maybe the next day. He still had that hope.

  Another glance through the window. The new arrivals were setting up camp, erecting a striped awning over the entrance to the caravan, putting out a picnic table and canvas chairs. Now they were sitting in the shade and drinking beer.

  Suds slid from the washing-up as he clattered it through onto the draining board. Finished. Done. Plates sparking clean. He pulled the plug in the sink, dried his hands, watched dirty water spurt into the bone-dry sludge drain outside the window under the drum boiler. On a Formica-topped folding table at the far end of the kitchen near the pantry he dumped an armload of loose items: sauces, sugar, spices, pickles, Alfoil, Gladwrap, cooking oil. On the floor under the table he placed a twenty-five-kilo bag of potatoes, and a ten-kilo net bag of brown onions, their tops furled back for access. Along the narrow shelf above the stove he arranged other bottles and jars ready to be grabbed: Podrova stock powder, mixed herbs, salt, pepper, soy sauce, chutney. Anything spicy or savoury, except for the chilli and garlic sauce, he had brought himself.

  When the contractor faxed through the Opening Store order for Five Stand Shearing Team he thought he had been sent a superseded list by mistake: tinned jam, condensed milk, tinned peas, tinned beans. It suggested a diet from before refrigeration. In Bourke he’d had the same feeling in the corner store where he’d rung the rockmelon grower; where everything for Opening Stores was on the shelves of the shop — nothing foreign, no perishables, no variety. He remembered the meals of his childhood: the mutton cutlets, the tinned beetroot, the kidneys on toast, the Sunday roasts either flaky like damp cardboard (mutton) or unchewably gristly (beef).

  Two thumps up the dining room steps, another two across the floorboards, and the sound of a metal refrigerator catch being opened. A male voice called, ‘Which one’s the beer fridge?’

  ‘Please yourself,’ he answered, thinking: beer fridge? All the space was used.

  He heard bottles being crushed against each other where he had judged there wasn’t another square centimetre available. Then a tall, black-haired, trim-bearded man of around thirty stepped into the kitchen clutching a cold VB stubby. He was wearing thongs, jeans, and a blue singlet. ‘Hot enough,’ he announced with a sharp grin, extending his free hand to be shaken. ‘I’m Davo.’ His eyes took in the state of the kitchen. ‘How’s it going, Cookie? Been here long? Where’d you come from today?’ He leant back against the door jamb, tucked the stubby under an elbow, and rolled himself a cigarette. ‘Some cooks arrive on Saturdays.’ (This felt like a criticism.) Then Davo moved around the kitchen inspecting the stores and draining his stubby. He went out to the fridge and got a fresh one. ‘Tell me, what did you do before you came cooking?’

  This was a question he didn’t want. He hesitated a long moment before answering. When the contractor had asked the same question he had been evasive. And he could have been anyone as far as the contractor was concerned — a poisoner looking for fresh challenges. But, sight unseen, Clean Team Alastair gave him the job anyway. ‘I always hang on to the fella with the car. He’s less trouble in the lo
ng run.’

  Davo shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘don’t tell me about yourself if you don’t want to,’ implying that everyone had their secrets, and who was he to pry. ‘Like a beer?’

  ‘Not right now.’

  He could have shut up right then. He had his opportunity. He could have gone down the path of cantankerous anonymity beloved to generations of snarling, incommunicative cooks, and never been sprung.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ he said instead.

  Davo’s eyebrows shot up. He remembered the name of a book. ‘Well, fuck me rigid,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Yours?’ This title had been on television. Others were all non-starters in the public mind, and in Davo’s. Then the grin again. ‘So you’ll write about this?’ Thinking that was why a writer had come to the ends of the earth. ‘Us?’ His fingers splayed out from the stubby, indicating the kitchen, the shed, the holding paddock, the rest of the team that hadn’t arrived yet, and looked as if it never would.

  He told Davo he didn’t know. Maybe he would. But it wasn’t why he had come out here, cutting everything off behind him, letting responsibilities fall away. He told himself that.

  More footsteps then, and Davo’s wife came up behind Davo, resting a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘We’ve got ourselves a writer, Barb,’ said Davo, making introductions, inclining his head in the cook’s direction.

  ‘Really?’ Barbara smiled a friendly greeting.

  ‘Now I’m a cook,’ he emphasised awkwardly.

  ‘Oh, well, Cookie, you’ll find me no trouble,’ said Barbara. ‘I just pick at things. I’m a health nut.’ She was tall, athletic looking, with dark curly hair. She looked capable of clearing two metres in the high jump with a crisp, graceful, long-legged scissor action, and taking anything else, any problems, in her stride. Placing a selection of wholegrain breakfast cereals on a shelf, she asked, ‘Okay if I keep these here?’ Her clear skin and soft dark eyes didn’t seem to belong in the factory context of a shearing shed. (But what did he know?) Easier to imagine her modelling swimwear for Sportsgirl. He asked her what she’d done before she became a wool classer. (It was open season on disclosure.)