by Lorna Hendry
In the afternoon, Jenny and I would make up school lunches for the next day and then I’d take over from Stan on the fuel pump so he could start putting together that week’s order for the store from the suppliers in Broome and Derby. That was my favourite job. It was hot and dusty out there, but I loved looking up at the escarpment behind the community and letting my mind soar into the distance. I felt alive and free and incredibly lucky to live somewhere so beautiful.
When we locked up at five o’clock, Jenny went back to her house to make dinner, Stan counted the day’s takings, and I swept and mopped the floors in readiness for the next day. Most afternoons James and half of Imintji’s kids would already be down at the local creek. Sometimes, if no-one could be bothered to walk, James would load them up on the roof of our car, six at a time, and drive slowly past the store, down the road and through the creek crossing while the kids shouted and waved at the tourists. We borrowed inflated inner tubes from Nev and floated in the warm, brown water amongst the water lilies, watching the older children swing off a fraying rope tied to an overhanging limb and splash into the water.
On my days off we drove to Bell Gorge and spent the day in the cool fresh water. Once we took a couple of the Imintji girls with us. At the top of the waterfall we started to cross the creek with our load of snacks, drinks, books and inflated inner tubes. One of the girls, Dellie, looked confused.
‘Where you going?’ she asked.
‘Over here’, James explained. ‘So we can get down there’, and he pointed to the pool below, where we planned to spend the day.
She laughed. ‘Why this way? We can jump.’
Oscar’s ears pricked up and he looked at her with awe.
‘Can we?’
‘Yeah. We do it all the time. We go from that ledge down there.’ She pointed to a large flat ledge in the cliff wall, about two metres below the point where the water rushed over the edge and fell straight down. ‘My brother, he jumps from right up the top. Runs straight past the tourists and just keeps going. They all scared for him. Sometimes they take photos.’
They did, too. We saw one months later at the Kununurra visitor centre. He had been snapped in mid-air, a gangly silhouette hanging above the waterfall. It was all I could do to stop myself unpinning it from the corkboard and stealing it.
Dylan and I walked down as usual, carrying the picnic, but James and Oscar jumped with Dellie that day and every single time afterwards.
As much as I loved the store and my job, it was soon obvious that Stan and Jenny had come back to work too soon. They were still suffering, not just from their injuries but also from shock. Stan had damaged his neck and he moved slowly and stiffly. One morning I watched his awkward gait as he walked along the short path from their house to the store and realised he looked much older than his years. Jenny had constant pain in her arm and shoulder, but the hospital had given her the all clear and told her the pain was purely in her head.
A bigger problem was that, while Jenny was processing what had happened to them by talking about it, Stan refused to discuss the accident. He just wanted to keep doing exactly what he had been doing before he had fallen out of a clear blue sky and landed on the red dirt in a pile of twisted metal. When the doorbell tinkled, he would go out and stand behind the counter and Jenny and I would hear him chat with the customers, just like he always had. He offered friendly advice and laughed with them about what a beautiful oasis he and Jenny had created ‘all the way out here’. When he came back to the kitchen he would go silent again, turning his back stiffly on us to peck slowly at the computer’s keyboard.
Only once did I see him falter behind the counter. Two women came in to look around the store while their husbands debated the price of diesel and decided whether or not to take their chances on fuel being cheaper at Mount Barnett. James checked the prices at Mount Barnett every day so Stan could set his a few cents lower, but if I tried to tell that to men like this their faces would close up and they would ignore me, convinced that I was trying to rip them off. As I waited behind Stan, one of the women came up to the counter and smiled knowingly at him, her dyed-too-bright red hair swinging.
‘I heard you had a helicopter crash here’, she said, a little too eagerly.
‘Hmmmm’, Stan murmured, looking down at the till.
‘That must have been exciting!’
He turned around to reorganise the dusty souvenirs on the shelf behind him, which hadn’t been touched once since my arrival, then mumbled something to me and walked out to the kitchen.
I glared at her. ‘He was on that helicopter’, I hissed.
The men outside gestured impatiently at the locked pump. I grabbed the key and shouted to Stan that I was going to do fuel. As Stan emerged reluctantly from the doorway, she trilled, ‘I heard you all died!’
I wanted to go back in and punch her hard in the face.
As the weather improved and more and more tourists came in, another couple were hired to help out. They were closer in age and personality to Stan and Jenny and we often heard them laughing and drinking together in the evenings. Jenny seemed relaxed and happy around them, in a way she certainly wasn’t with me. I wasn’t too surprised when Stan knocked on the door of our caravan at six o’clock one morning and told me I wasn’t needed anymore.
With lots of free time on my hands, I took to visiting Nev’s workshop. I answered the phone and chatted to the people who drove in with blown tyres or disturbing rattles in their engine. Sometimes I just went over to escape the claustrophobic heat of the caravan and lie on his couch to read a book. One day he said that he hadn’t done a tax return for years because he couldn’t get his head around the paperwork. He gestured in the direction of six plastic tubs stuffed with receipts, bank statements, chequebook butts and a few girlie magazines. I spent the next three days sitting on the seagrass matting that covered his concrete floor, sorting documents and making lists of expenses and income while sweat dripped from my nose onto the papers.
Nev had lived at Imintji for years. He’d seen shopkeepers and people like us come and go. He’d learned to live with the land and the people, building up a viable business on the edge of the community and keeping pretty much to himself. When one of the families went into town and left behind a pregnant dog, Jenny asked him to help her break into the house to rescue the dog and her litter. Although he’d told me that in the wet season he sometimes had to shoot starving dogs that were roaming the community and becoming dangerous, he was reluctant to get involved.
‘They always know’, he explained to me. ‘Dogs and cars. It’s a connection they have. One bloke left his car with me when he went off to work on the mines. It was stuffed, so it just sat in the grass behind my place. Over the wet, the grass grew so high I couldn’t even see it. Then one day a tourist car limped in. God knows what they thought they were doing on that road in the wet season. I didn’t think I had the spare they needed, but I remembered the bloke’s car was the same model. So I got the part off it, thinking I’d replace it the next time I was in town. Wasn’t like the car was going anywhere. But you know, even though there wasn’t anyone in the community, I did think twice about it. The very next day, the phone rang. It was the bloke calling from Kununurra. “You been stripping my car for parts, you bastard!”’
In July the Imintji community chartered the school bus to take them to Derby for the annual Boab Festival. On the way into town I got a running commentary from one of the men about the country we were driving through. He told me unlikely stories about clocks nailed to trees so that the stockmen would know what time it was and of plumbed taps in hidden gorges. I was used to being teased. There seemed to be nothing the Imintji mob enjoyed more than telling me unbelievable stories with perfectly straight faces, waiting for me to go along with it before cracking up in hysterics.
‘Over there, between those hills, that’s where they wanted to put this road. But we said no, you can’t do that. What about the elephants, we said. We made them go round instead.’
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I raised my eyebrows a little and sat up straighter, shifting the damp weight of the toddler who was asleep on my lap. ‘What elephants?’
He threw his head back and laughed, delighted. ‘Hey, you mob. Lorna here, she don’t know the elephants!’
The laughter spread through the bus. People were turning in their seats, looking back at me and shaking their heads.
‘You drive along here all the time and you never seen the elephants?’ said one of the young women incredulously.
Someone tapped James on the shoulder and asked him to stop the bus. The young woman climbed out and waved at me to follow. I handed the toddler back to his mother and jumped down. We stood on the side of the road and she pointed to the rolling hills ahead. The road curved, taking a very wide detour around them. I could see why the engineers might have preferred to build the road in a straight line through a convenient gap between the hills right in front of us.
‘See?’ she asked. And suddenly I did. Two elephants in silhouette, each made up of two hills – one for the body and a smaller one for the head. Behind the larger elephant, on the other side of the gap, a smaller elephant was right on its tail.
‘Be wrong to separate a baby from its mother’, she said matter-of-factly, heading back into the cooler air of the bus.
Every few weeks, nodding a greeting to the elephants, I drove into Derby to shop. The Snack Stop on the Lennard River, where we had stopped for ice-cream the year before, was halfway between Imintji and Derby. We had introduced ourselves to Robert, who had teased us the year before about the male croc, and I always stopped to have a cup of tea and see if he needed anything in town. Often he did, so on the way back I’d off-load cartons of soft drink or bags of groceries.
One day Robert spoke longingly about a girl who used to help him at the store. ‘Lovely girl. She used to come and mind the van for me. Sometimes I need to go into Derby, but I can’t leave the place empty.’ He looked at me.
‘Just ring me, Robert. Any time.’
A few days later he did, his scratchy voice barking over the sat phone. ‘Next Tuesday?’
I took Dylan to keep me company and we got to Robert’s before eight in the morning. He showed us around the van and gave us our instructions. ‘Help yourself to whatever you want, make sure no-one steals anything and don’t drink all my beer.’
Not long after he left, a truck pulled up and three young men climbed out and asked for coffee, Coke and pies. Dylan handled the cold drinks and took the money, counting the coins out carefully and checking with me that he had it right. He took the job as seriously as only a seven-year-old could. I dealt with the hot drinks. On the bench beside the kettle was an old tea strainer that Robert had said was to catch stray frogs that might have climbed into the kettle overnight. I was pretty sure he was joking, but I did it anyway, pouring the boiling water carefully through the brown mesh, looking for intruders.
It wasn’t even nine o’clock but it was already hot. After breakfast, the men walked down to the muddy waterhole that was all that was left of the river and jumped in for a swim. Dylan went with them and I sat and drank my tea and watched him. Just a year and a half ago he had been a city kid and now he was splashing about in murky brown water with three big Aboriginal blokes. And he also seemed to have completely forgotten that he had seen crocodiles in this river.
In the end, not many people came in. It was September, late in the season, and getting too hot and humid for tourists. When Robert got back, he showed us a tattered book in which he wrote down all the questions that tourists asked him. Dylan read some out loud and Robert crowed his standard responses.
‘Do you live here?’
‘No, I fly in by helicopter every day from Derby.’
‘Do the crocodiles have their babies here?’
‘No, there’s a special maternity ward for them at the hospital in Broome.’
‘Where do you sleep?’
‘In the five-star hotel over that hill.’
He actually slept on a stretcher bed beside the caravan: outside, under the stars, unperturbed by mosquitoes or moths or snakes or bugs. He had a colourful crocheted blanket that was tucked in tightly over the mattress. His old dog slept by his side.
‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘No, because you buggers keep coming in and asking me stupid bloody questions!’
‘Why did you put the sticks up there?’
The three of us looked up at the brittle grey twigs lodged in the tropical roof above the van. In a month or two, the rain would start falling and the Lennard River would flow. At its peak, the river rushes through the Napier Range into Windjana Gorge where it has carved out a path that is 100 metres wide with cliffs up to 30 metres high. The water would rise up the bank to flood the spot where we were sitting and keep rising until the roof above us was submerged. The sticks were from last year’s wet season: floating debris caught in the corners of the metal roof as the water retreated and reminders that this was a transient, seasonal place.
‘Why do you live out here?’
He just looked at me. I knew the answer to that one now.
On our way home, we drove past the surreal black rock formation of Queen Victoria Head, where the road cuts through the Napier Range and creates a perfect silhouette of an imperious face with a truly regal nose pointing up to the sky. From here, the road struggled up steep hills and down through dry creek beds. Whenever the car rounded the high bends, the world dropped down below us and I could see for miles. I had to drag my eyes from the view and concentrate on keeping the car on the road. Most of the track was rocky and corrugated, except where it was sealed at river crossings and the steepest jump-ups. The whole way home, I could hear the shopping Robert had picked up for me crashing around in the back.
Every time I drove that road my heart thumped hard in my chest as the car veered unexpectedly on a patch of loose gravel or thudded into a pothole. But tears always clogged my throat when I got to the lookout at the top of the King Leopold Ranges and looked down at the country I was lucky enough to live in.
One night we went up to the lookout with Nev to watch the sun set over the escarpment behind Imintji. Bushfires were burning in the national park below us and, as it grew darker, the line of fire shone brightly. On the top of the range, I could make out a dark crimson glow. I watched as it grew brighter, wondering if this was another fire that we should be worried about, when a huge red orb suddenly glided over the escarpment. I gasped. It was massive and terrifying and beautiful.
‘Now there’s a Kimberley moon’, said Nev.
Chapter Eighteen
The dry season was retreating and it was getting hotter and more humid every day. The swimming hole at the creek was warm and sluggish and was becoming less and less inviting. We’d already seen the first snake of the season and I was getting worried about the boys. They were still sleeping in the caravan’s rotting canvas annexe and woke up most mornings with new mosquito bites on their faces and necks.
Most of the families had gone into town for a funeral and weeks later none of them had returned. Oscar and Dylan were banned from wandering around the community without an adult – the stray dogs were becoming more and more aggressive – and they were getting bored and grumpy. Bell Gorge was about to close for the wet season and the novelty of living on the Gibb was wearing thin.
The problem was that a few months earlier James and I had decided that we weren’t going home at the end of this second year of our trip. We still couldn’t think of a good reason to go back, and we had also really wanted to experience a Kimberley wet season. But now I couldn’t imagine spending the next six months in this caravan. There had already been one big dump of rain and it had poured in the roof and into the domed plastic light fittings, filling them with rusty water. I had no idea how we would get through months of torrential rain and oppressive heat with only a tiny van for all four of us to hide in. The temperature was regularly hitting 40°C and humidity was up around 90 per cent.
/> When the September school holidays arrived we bolted for Broome, relieved to have a fortnight’s break from the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere of Imintji. We were looking forward to swimming at Cable Beach and visiting our Scottish friends, Linda and Andy. Broome was also a chance to shop for new clothes and books – maybe even go to a restaurant and see a movie or two. We’d been away from Melbourne for more than eighteen months and, although we’d booked flights to go back home for Christmas, we were in desperate need of some creature comforts and friendly faces.
First, though, we decided to spend a few days camping at Middle Lagoon again, and also have a look at Cape Leveque. We planned our drive up the Dampier Peninsula on a weekday this time so that we could drop into Lombadina. Twelve kilometres from the tip of the peninsula we turned left off the main road and followed the signs into the community. After paying the $10 visitor fee at the office we parked the car and went exploring on foot. The community’s main buildings – a cool, open-sided church with a paperbark roof, an elevated building that was used as a workshop and craft store, a garage and workshop, a health clinic, an old bakery, a tiny store and a primary school – sat around a neatly mown oval that was dotted with trees. Picnic benches sat outside the store in the shade of a large gum tree, and a concrete basketball court was cracking in the bright sunlight. As we wandered around, I thought it looked a bit like an outback version of a traditional English village green.
Lombadina was set up in the early 1900s as an outpost of the larger Catholic mission at Beagle Bay, 60 kilometres south. The Sisters of St John of God ran the mission and its school until 1968 and the church was built from local materials in 1932. Lombadina and its close neighbour, Djarindjin, are now both self-governing and independent communities. The school, church, cemetery and health centres are shared resources. Lombadina is often held up as an example of an Indigenous community that has built up a successful and sustainable industry around cultural tourism. Visitors can stay in cabins and go on tours with local community members – mud-crabbing, kayaking, fishing and whale watching – learn about the history and culture of the country, eat bush tucker or take a drive to see ancient fossilised human footprints preserved in the nearby rocks.
