The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  The irony was that there were still plenty of cheap blocks available. The depression had stifled demand. All he needed, John mused, was a little capital. True, he’d heard that most of the farmers who had taken up selections on the Kuran run were already going broke. Apparently the land was less fertile than predicted, and there were mysterious barren patches amidst the grass, confounding the newcomers. But John had known every inch of the land, good and bad, since he was a child. If he ever chose a farm for himself out there, it would be in the right place and it would succeed. But of course he had no capital. In the end,he would always lift up his eyes from the plains to the distant spur that jutted out from the mountains, unable to see Kuran House, but knowing exactly where it stood. And the familiar despair would rise in him, and the yearning, and the anger.

  For the House was still empty. The new owners had gone bankrupt only a few months after taking possession. The property had returned to the bank, and there had been no buyer for it since. A caretaker staff remained in the cottages — but the House itself was completely shut down, its gardens already running wild. In these times, it seemed, no one had any use for a mansion. And for John that was the most terrible thing. He could almost feel the great homestead calling out to him, giant and deserted. The thought of it burned. The House should have been his. It should be his, even now. If only he could raise the money to reclaim the place as his own. What a moment that would be, what a revenge upon Elizabeth! But it was impossible. The work on the wheat farm ended with the harvest, and once again he was stalking the streets of Powell with a bare few coins in his pockets. From where was this great fortune to come?

  Early 1933 found John labouring in a sawmill on the outskirts of town. The pay was miserly, and it was a dreary life, toting wood and choking on sawdust and bloodying his hands with splinters. Then, one summer afternoon as dust hung stifling about the mill, John saw a small party of men approaching. They were walking slowly along the road that led down from the Hoop Mountains, and they bore a roughly hewn stretcher on which a shape lay, covered by a sheet. Flies buzzed hungrily about it, and a man walked at the stretcher’s side, brushing them away. The group paused in the shade of tree. Word passed around that they were timber-getters, a logging team from the mountains, one of several that supplied the mill. Usually they came to town only every few months, for supplies, or to besiege some hotel bar until their money was gone. But that day one of the loggers had been crushed by a falling tree. His comrades had carried him down in search of medical aid, but he had died before reaching it. Knowing he had a wife and family in Powell, they had elected to carry his body all the way home.

  John studied the men. They were lean and wiry, with strangely pale faces and watchful eyes, their forearms densely muscled. Even standing about idly they radiated a profound assurance in themselves, so different from the sawmill workers, or the thousands of unemployed John had seen on the roads. Their home was high in the hills, where even the depression, it seemed, had not touched them. Now they were a man down. Something stirred inside John. He lifted his eyes eastward to the Hoop Mountains. They stood clean and high against the sky, a tumble of green and grey, a country of cool airs and misty streams, a thousand miles away from the heat and grime.

  John was decided in an instant. He walked away from the sawmill, to where the men waited with the corpse beneath the tree.

  Chapter Ten

  THE OLD UTILITY RATTLED ALONG BETWEEN THE PINES OF THE driveway. It was another fine blue morning and William sat in the passenger seat, glancing warily across at his uncle. The cabin was redolent of earth and diesel, and mould from the seats. All pleasant smells, and sandwiches had been packed for the tour of the station … and yet William remained uneasy. A whole day with the old man. For the moment, in the sunlight and with his arm on the window, his uncle looked as benign as someone’s grandfather. But William remembered the prophet, stern and testing, from the night of the shooting stars.

  His mother had emphasised the point. ‘Pay attention to what he says today. He’s not doing this just for fun.’

  So William waited, alert, but right now his uncle was only whistling amiably. They turned off the driveway onto a track that swung south down the hill, past the sheds and silos that he had seen the day before. His uncle showed no interest in the buildings. At the foot of the slope the track turned back east, to run alongside the creek. William peered over the dashboard, trying to see if there was any water in the channel.

  The old man broke off whistling. ‘Kuran Creek, it’s called. It starts up in the mountains and runs along the whole southern side of the spur.’

  ‘Can you swim in it?’

  ‘Well…there’s only a few puddles these days, with the drought. Further up in the hills you might get a bit of water flowing, but not this far down.’

  The track curved away and crossed into the next valley. There was the church and the graveyard on the far slope. It was so close, William marvelled. How was it possible that he had become lost between here and the House? Then he remembered the names he’d read on the gravestones.

  ‘Who were the Whites?’ he asked.

  His uncle frowned.‘They owned the station, long ago.’

  ‘The graves are all broken.’

  A shrug.‘Just goes to show, doesn’t it? There’s better things to leave behind than headstones.’ The utility was rolling past the cemetery, and the old man eyed the tombs. ‘I’ll tell you this — when my time comes, I’m going on the bonfire.’

  They topped the next rise. A jumble of hills spread out before them,the spur receding all the way to the blue line of the mountains.

  William’s uncle straightened enthusiastically behind the wheel. ‘Now, from here on we’re into the station proper. Ten miles it runs from this spot, two or three miles wide all the way.’

  William stared across the broad slopes, their hides brown with grass and dotted with trees. A brief memory came of what it had been like the previous day, when the countryside had seemed so bewildering — but in fact he hadn’t even made it beyond the home paddock!

  His uncle’s smile was knowing. ‘The first thing to learn is, always be aware of exactly where you are. So get it right. These hills are the westernmost spur of the Hoop Mountains, and the Hoops themselves are a spur of the Great Dividing Range. Think of a map of Australia. Think of the east coast. The Great Divide runs the whole length of it. We’re about halfway down, on the western side of the range, a hundred miles inland from Brisbane.’

  They were moving downhill now, into another small valley. The track was rutted and overgrown in places, slowing them down, but in any case, his uncle seemed in no hurry.

  ‘It’s interesting though. Go back a few hundred million years. Right here where we stand, there was nothing back then but ocean. The continent that eventually became Australia was somewhere else entirely — it was wandering about between the equator and the south pole. It wasn’t even the same shape as now. You wouldn’t be able to find the station on it, you wouldn’t even be able to find the hills or the plains. None of them existed. You see what I mean? It’s one thing to know where a piece of land is. It’s another to know where it came from.’

  The old man’s eyes were searching the horizons appreciatively.

  ‘Away across in Western Australia — now there you’ve got some old country. You’ve got rock that’s been exposed for age upon age, and it’s as lifeless as the moon. But this country, it’s pretty young. The only old thing around here is the bedrock, down there under the plains. Millions of years ago it was the bottom of an inland sea. Then the ocean levels dropped and you had a sandstone plain covered in swamps and bogs. It dried out finally, but meanwhile in the east volcanoes were erupting and the mountains were formed and the plains were drowned again, in lava and ash this time. Over the centuries the lava and ash broke down, and that’s where the black soil comes from. But do you know why there aren’t any trees out there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The black soil won’t support
them. Not big ones, anyway. In droughts it cracks open and snaps their roots, in the wet it turns liquid and trees just topple. So there’s only ever been grass out there. A treeless plain. And because of all that grass, people came. With sheep. And then with wheat. You’ve heard of Allan Cunningham? He was the first European to lay eyes on the place, in 1827. He battled his way north from Sydney through forests and mountain ranges and suddenly he saw this open, rolling country. Perfect for grazing. He named it after the Governor of New South Wales — Lieutenant-General Ralph Darling. And so here we are today.’

  William nodded. He knew that Cunningham was a famous explorer — but that was only history. He was more impressed by the station unfolding before him. They couldn’t be more than a mile along the track, but to William it already felt wide and empty. Old fences ran alongside the road, and a few grazing cattle lifted their heads as the utility drove by, but there were no buildings, no ploughed paddocks, no telephone poles or power lines. Just the hills and the blue sky above.

  ‘Of course, what Cunningham saw was only the southern edge of the Downs. That’s miles south of here, down near Warwick. He never saw the Kuran Plains or the Hoop Mountains. That was left to the first settlers. The grass was so tall that it came up to the shoulders of their horses. But along the spur here, this was all eucalypt forest. It took them years to clear it for grazing.’

  They hadn’t cleared it entirely, however. There were still plenty of trees on the open slopes, where the grass grew brown and stiff, and cattle rested in the shade. Tall graceful gums with smooth white trunks, or grey ones with the bark peeling away in hairy strips. Trees that flung out wide canopies and had fat red trunks like rusty iron, trees that were hunched and contorted, with rough, jagged bark. There were gullies too, with a denser scrub of bushes and ugly, tangled vines. William saw crows take flight as the utility approached, heard their harsh croaks over the engine. He glimpsed a hare darting off the road in alarm. And once he was startled by three wallabies rearing out of the grass and bounding away. But mostly the hills were a sleepy, shaggy place, an old country baking under the sun. His uncle said it was young, but that was impossible to believe.

  ‘Hardly anyone comes here now,’ the old man said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Only the cattle, and not so many of them, not with the drought. We’re running about a quarter of what we’d have in a good season. At mustering time I’ll have men up here with horses or motorbikes, but otherwise there’s no reason for anyone to be around. And that’s the way I want to keep it. Some stations out west get tourists in. They set up campgrounds and picnic areas, and people wander all over the place. Not on my land, though. I’d never let that happen here.’

  William could hear the pride in the way his uncle said ‘my land’. It had never occurred to him to be proud of his little farm back home. How could you be proud of a square mile of dirt? But the station was something much more, a great bulk of land that rolled and reared. The hills rose steeper, and the crests of some them were tumbled with boulders. The banks of the gullies grew more precipitous, the scrub within them more dense and forbidding. Now they were passing into an altogether wilder, darker country. The House and its gentle hill seemed far behind, and it was easy to imagine packs of wild dogs roaming up here, and century-old trees lurking in forgotten corners. The only modern structure William could see was a rusty windmill, standing at the foot of a tall slope, a water tank tethered to its side, with a trough for the cattle. The grass was beaten down around it, and from the windmill a narrow path curled back and forth up the hill. The top was half hidden by trees, but staring up William thought he could see — somehow disturbingly — a ring of stones there, jutting from the grass.

  ‘In the early days,’ his uncle continued, ‘these hills were a lonely place. The only thing up here was an old shepherd’s hut. When I was boy I used to hear stories about how two men were stationed there, way back in the 1850s, when there was no House or anything. Supposedly, both of them went mad, alone for so long. One of them killed the other with an axe. Only bits of the body ever turned up. People said his friend ate him. I don’t know if that’s true. But the hut was still standing when I was young. And believe me, the place felt weird. Now though, it’s just a few old posts. You’d pass it right by without even knowing.’

  And on they went, the old man’s talk carrying them further and further into the hills. Finally, they began to climb out of a narrow valley, and William’s uncle dropped the utility into its lowest gear.

  ‘Almost there now,’ he said. ‘Our first stop.’

  They were ascending a steep hill. A single tree, bent by years of wind, marked the crown. And beyond that seemed to be open air.

  The utility coughed to a halt beneath the tree. William was aware of a wide view all around, as they climbed out. The air was cool and still, and they were much higher up than he had expected. The first thing he saw were the Hoop Mountains. They had appeared from nowhere, immediately to the east, leaping up in a series of tall ridges, blue and crisp in the winter light, a thousand metres high. From his father’s farm on the plains, these same mountains had been a faded blue line on the horizon; now they seemed close enough to touch. He could see individual trees standing upon the crest of the central range. Thick forests swept down the flanks, but in the shadowed glens a tantalising darkness waited, naked cliffs of stone where the mountainsides had collapsed, while in other places again the peaks were worn and rounded and bore only grass, like great hairless heads. But the closeness was an illusion, he realised. The main ridge was still some miles away. In between, he could see now, were the higher foothills, a rugged tumble of them, cast out by the mountains and descending in waves until they lapped at the foot of the rise on which he stood.

  ‘Well, this is all of it.’ The old man had his hands in his pockets, as he stared out at the world. ‘Everything that Kuran Station ever was. Twenty-five miles north to south along the tops of the mountains here, and then another twenty miles out into the plains, all the way to the Condamine River. Five hundred square miles all told.’

  William turned slowly to take it all in. The Hoop Mountains strode away in a great curve to either side, and the plains washed up against the foothills like a yellow sea. The spur was a wide, humpbacked spear of land jutting far out into that ocean. Its last hill, where Kuran House sat, remained hidden away at the western extremity. And beyond that was a great swathe of farmland, blurring with distance, until the horizon waited in an arc against the sky. William turned full circle, and confronted the mountains again. It was dumbfounding to think that it had all been one property once.

  His uncle was shaking his head.‘It was too big, of course, even from the beginning. Ridiculous to think it could all hold together. They started breaking it up almost straight away. The mountains were the first to go. By the time the Whites took over, the boundary had been pulled back to the foothills. There were already loggers up there, and then people from Powell started using the mountains for camping trips. Later on the government turned it all into the national park.’

  William was searching the mountains for landmarks he could recognise from visits he had made with his parents, but the angle was wrong. He could see no sign of the road that climbed up from Powell, or of the little resort village and camping grounds that he knew were nestled up there, next to the park. But he remembered guided walks with the rangers, and listening to lectures about the forest, craning his neck to see the tops of the giant trees — the famous bunya pines, and, of course, the hoop pines which gave the mountains their name.

  ‘The mountains don’t matter to us,’ his uncle said.‘They’re the old Kuran Station, and we’ll never get that back. Now there’s only twenty-odd square miles left, and that’s what concerns you and me. What we’re standing on right now. The land I own.’

  William looked west again.

  ‘Do you see?’ His uncle crouched down at his side. ‘It’s nothing like the farm you grew up on. Your farm was a machine, a factory to grow wheat. But this isn
’t anything like that. This is a piece of country. It’s not just about heads of cattle per acre. This place is alive in its own right. It has a history. It’s growing and changing all the time. It breathes.’

  Glancing at the old man’s face, William saw a warmth there he wouldn’t have thought existed. It wasn’t directed at him, it was directed outwards, to the hills.

  ‘It even talks, to the right person. And that’s the thing — finding the right person. The truth is, land has to belong to someone to really come alive. It needs a human being to hear it and see it and to understand everything about it — where it came from, where it’s going. Otherwise it’s just a piece of ground. And when I die, I won’t be leaving a hole in a cemetery or my name on a gravestone. This is what I’ll be leaving.’

  He was studying William now, his gaze intent.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

  William couldn’t bear that gaze for long. It felt as if the old man saw deep within him and found only a lack, a little boy who didn’t understand anything. He dropped his eyes.

  His uncle sighed, climbed to his feet.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said after a time, ‘this is as far east as we can go. From here we head south.’

  William turned and looked down. At the foot of the hill was a line of winding trees that marked another creek — or possibly a different part of the one that ran past the House. A fence stretched along the near bank.

  ‘Cross over the creek,’ his uncle said, ‘and you’re into the national park.’