The Burning Land

by John Fletcher

  ‘Two hundred and fifty pounds.’ Matthew looked at Hamish. ‘You reckon he would?’

  ‘Why not? Nobody’s said anything about gold—I didn’t hear one squeak about it at the tavern—and hell still be making a profit. If he really wants to sell he’ll jump at it.’

  ‘Won’t he wonder why we want to buy?’

  ‘He’ll just think we’re fools wanting to go in for sheep,’ Hamish grinned. ‘I’ll make sure he thinks that.’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty pounds will be just the start of it,’ Matthew warned.

  ‘Of course. We’ll need mining machinery, our own stamps … We’re looking at deep mining here. A big capital investment, several thousand pounds’ worth. But think of it, Matthew,’ excitement opening the flood gates at last, ‘our own mine! All of it! No more nonsense of twelve foot claims, it’ll all be ours.’

  ‘What did you tell them at the assay office? They won’t have seen dust like that from around here. Didn’t they want to know where it came from?’

  Hamish laughed exuberantly. ‘I gave ’em some yarn about getting it from some old feller who’d been up Maldon way. Ain’t none of their business anyhow.’

  He looked at Matthew. His eyes were shining with excitement. Yes, Matthew thought, Hamish was another one. It was the search that counted for these fellows. Gold was fine but the search, the constant seeking, was what drew them to the goldfields and kept them there. Like a fly in a web.

  ‘We’ll be millionaires‚’ Hamish said.

  Matthew shook his head. ‘I reckon not. I’ve enjoyed most of what we’ve done. We’ve been lucky. That’s enough for me.’

  It was not an easy thing to say. It wasn’t the gold that mattered. It was ending a relationship that had meant a great deal to them both and still did.

  Hamish stared. ‘You can’t be serious. There’s more gold than ironstone in that mountain. This comes off, we’ll be set for life. Get ourselves a fancy house in Sydney, travel first class to England, to America. Have dukes’ daughters making eyes at us! A job for life, that’s what it’ll be!’

  He’s right, Matthew thought. I’ll be crazy to turn this down. But knew he would. There was too much out there over the horizon. He didn’t want a job for life, not in mining, not in anything.

  The land out there was calling to him. Beyond riches, beyond anything else, he wanted to live.

  Book Four

  Westward

  The vagabonding love of change

  That drove us westward of the range

  And westward of the suns.

  Banjo Paterson

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The sun was sinking in the west as Matthew emerged from the house and walked across the yard to the post-and-railed paddock where he kept his horses. There were thirty of them. He leant his elbows on the fence and eyed them assessingly: a blood stallion he had picked up half-starved from the town pound, some brood mares bought from a farmer who had decided to go mining, the rest from a brumby mob he had mustered in the ranges. There were two geldings he used for riding but these he kept in a separate paddock at the back of the house. He also had cattle that he mustered from time to time from the herds that roamed the hills: domestic stock that had been abandoned during the long years of the depression that had preceded the gold rush. They were wild enough now, with shaggy hides and yard-long horns, and as lively as fleas on a griddle.

  ‘My God‚’ Matthew had said to Tom Naismith when they returned from their first muster, ‘we ever get around to taking this lot north we’ll be at the equator in a week.’

  It was a cheap way to acquire stock all the same.

  Two years earlier, when Matthew had turned his back on mining, on Hamish Fairchild, Luke Bryant and Nance Radin, he had headed north across the Murray. The lure of the vast land burned in his blood, the exotic blue butterfly of his childhood still summoned him north, but he knew sheep, not cattle, and people said it was cattle that did best away from the settled areas. To learn about cattle he had either to start his own run or go and work for someone else. After his experiences with Cusack, Matthew had sworn never again to work for another man.

  Crown land was being sold at Moriarty, twenty miles northwest of Sydney. He bought three hundred and twenty acres at a pound an acre, built a slab and bark hut, put up a split-rail paddock and hired a hand for the cattle he had not yet got.

  Matthew met Tom Naismith in one of Moriarty’s many pubs. A lean, long-jawed man with freckled skin, red hair and a scrag of red beard under his chin, Tom had worked all his twenty-three years with cattle in the back country and had left because of trouble over a girl. The two men mustered horses and cattle together, they got drunk together and once paid a social visit to Sydney together to sample some high living. They became friends.

  Now the sun’s rays, turning golden as they approached the horizon, cast a tranquil glow over the line of trees that fringed the boundary of the property. Matthew could see Tom riding his mare slowly towards the house. He turned from the railed fence and went back indoors. Most of the run was unfenced and Tom had been out tailing the new stock they’d picked up a couple of weeks ago. When he got back he’d be hungry and it was Matthew’s turn to cook supper. He’d best get on with it.

  ‘Them cattle’s just about bedded down‚’ Tom said as he polished off his plateful of stew and reached for seconds. ‘We could think about rounding up some more any time you’re ready.’

  ‘We’ve got about three hundred head‚’ Matthew said. ‘That’s close to one an acre.’

  ‘This land can handle more than that. Course, with your money I dunno why you don’t just go out and buy some.’

  ‘I like a bit of excitement now and then.’ Mustering set the blood running through his veins and that was what he liked. ‘I’d like to lay my hands on a few more breeding cows,’ he continued. ‘They’ll come in useful when we head north.’

  Matthew was always talking about it. Mostly Tom let him talk but now he said, ‘Maybe now’s the time, if you’re serious about moving.’

  Matthew raised his eyebrows. ‘You think so?’

  ‘Saw someone in Sydney last week. Bloke called Charlton Grange. You ought to talk to him. He knows the interior better than any man I’ve ever met. He was with Patrick Leslie up in the Darling Downs and he’s been north several times since.’

  ‘Patrick Leslie? That was sixteen years ago.’

  ‘I said he knew what he was talking about, I didn’t say he was a kid.’

  ‘He’s been going north for sixteen years, he’s lucky he’s still alive.’

  ‘Maybe it’s more than luck‚’ Tom said.

  Matthew and Tom met Charlton Grange at the Sydney stockyard sales. Charlton was a big man, about forty, with a beard half way down his chest and shrewd, far-focused eyes. ‘So you’re thinking of heading north?’

  ‘Thinking about it‚’ Matthew admitted.

  ‘Best make up your mind, you want to get in before the rush.’

  Matthew had never learnt to welcome other men telling him what to do. ‘I hear there’s plenty of space.’

  ‘Not all of it usable though.’

  In the background the auctioneer was rattling through his patter. ‘Fifteen shillings and sixpence, against you sir, sixteen, may I say seventeen thank you sir and six …’

  Matthew said, ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Desert is what it means. Red desert, sand desert, stone desert, all of ’em as hot and dry as the pit of hell.’

  Matthew’s dreams had no room for deserts. ‘If it’s as bad as that, what’s the point of going there?’

  ‘Because it ain’t just desert. Them plains stretch for hundreds of miles. In some parts the grass is up to your knees. You could pasture a million cattle on them.’

  That was what Matthew wanted to hear. ‘We need to talk.’

  The three men walked through the bustling streets until they reached the Square and Compasses Hotel where they found a corner table and sat down.

  ‘These plains
with grass up to your knees‚’ Matthew asked, ‘how far north are they from here?’

  ‘Not so much north as west.’

  Matthew frowned. ‘I’d set my heart on the north.’

  ‘Too late. The Darling Downs were all settled five years after Leslie got there. Moreton Bay and Gladstone are gone, too. Same with Rockhampton and Maryborough. The whole coastal area is settled now.’ The prophet’s eyes raked Matthew. ‘I take it that ain’t what you had in mind?’

  ‘I’ve never been much for crowds,’ Matthew admitted.

  ‘No crowds out west.’

  ‘You seen it?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘Some of it,’ Grange said. ‘Ain’t no one seen it all. It’s too big for any man. Too big for a hundred men.’

  To Matthew it sounded good. ‘All covered in knee-deep grazing?’

  Charlton shook his head. ‘Not all. Some of it’s dry all the time. All of it’s dry some of the time. That’s why anyone who fancies going out there had better get going or they’ll miss out. Once the best parts are taken there won’t be room for no one else. No man alive can make a living out of the desert.’

  ‘What about the blacks?’ Tom asked. ‘I hear they’re more wild out there than around here.’

  ‘They don’t cause no trouble if you handle them right.’

  ‘If it’s as good as you say,’ Matthew said, ‘how come you’re back?’

  ‘I’m a restless bastard,’ Charlton said. ‘Always wantin’ to see over the next horizon.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain what you’re doing back here in Sydney,’ Matthew said. ‘The next horizon’s out ahead, not back here.’

  Charlton shrugged. ‘A man don’t settle, he never builds no stake. I’m broke.’

  ‘We’ve been building up a herd‚’ Matthew said, ‘but I’d thought to head north, not west.’

  Charlton said nothing, big fingers turning his empty glass on the wooden surface of the table.

  Matthew decided to test him a little. ‘You know the interior. If I asked you to head north with us, would you come?’

  Silence. The turning glass tapped on. Eventually Charlton said, ‘Don’ reckon I would.’

  ‘A new horizon‚’ Matthew pointed out.

  ‘Not much of a horizon when you got to share it with a mob of other blokes. The northwest’s a big country. Empty. A man can breathe out there.’

  ‘And drought?’ Matthew asked, still testing. ‘A man could die too. And his stock.’

  ‘Anyone worried about dyin’ should stay in the city. So long as he don’t fool himself he’s free.’

  Matthew had a vision: mile after mile of rolling grassland stretching to the horizon and beyond, covered with herds of cattle without number and horses, all bearing his brand. And going west now did not mean he couldn’t head northwards later. ‘How far to this country you’re talking about?’ he asked.

  Charlton’s eyes narrowed. Matthew knew he was seeing not the smoke-darkened walls of the bar but the rise and fall of the distant plains, the quiet rivers, the deserts of sand and polished stone, the open country stretching away beneath a huge and brilliant sky.

  ‘Around a thousand miles.’

  ‘We got a tad over three hundred head at Moriarty,’ Matthew said. ‘If those plains are as big as you say, that won’t be enough.’ His eyes challenged Charlton across the table. ‘If I say we’re heading northwest, will you come and give us a hand with the muster?’

  ‘If it means I get to go with you.’

  ‘How long will it take you to get ready?’ Matthew asked him.

  ‘Long enough to pick up my bag. I travel light.’

  ‘Just as well‚’ Matthew said. ‘Those beasts are fast. Carry surplus weight you won’t even catch them, never mind muster them.’

  An hour out of Matthew’s run the three men rode over the brow of a rise and saw a bunch of cattle half a mile away in a draw between two rocky crags. Matthew reined in to consider the position.

  ‘We go at them from here they’ll be off over the hill and we’ll lose them,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get around behind them without frightening them off. Tom, you get up to the left and stop them heading that way. Charlton, you stay here and make sure they don’t break past this side. I’ll come at them from the top, push them down towards you.’ He looked again at the rock walls and grassy ravines leading back from the central draw, making sure he had the escape routes covered. ‘That should do it unless they’re into climbing cliffs.’

  Tom rode off, keeping below the crest of the ridge to avoid frightening the cattle in the draw. Matthew waited until he saw Tom’s silhouette against the sky, well up the defile he had been sent to guard, then he turned away and drew a long circle through the bush until, after half an hour, he reached the high ground above the herd and began to move down through the rocky defile. Soon the slope steepened, winding between outcrops of grey rock that rose more than a hundred feet on either hand. At every step shale shifted threateningly beneath his mount’s hooves.

  At last he passed through a narrow defile into the grassy meadow where they had seen the herd. The cattle were grazing a quarter of a mile from him. Their heads came up as he rode out into the sunlight and the lead bull trotted forward a few paces to face him.

  Matthew rode slowly towards him. There were over a hundred animals in the herd, the shaggy beasts standing motionless, watchful, waiting for the leader to make his move. The bull was big, reddish in colour, with a huge hump of muscle behind his neck. If he charged the rest of the herd would follow and Matthew would be right in their path.

  The bull snorted, the sound explosive in the stillness. The mare stirred uneasily, as aware as Matthew of the danger.

  He drew his rifle from its holster. He was reluctant to waste a bullet but once the herd charged it would be too late.

  Turn, you bastard, he thought. He rode a little nearer.

  The bull snorted again and pawed the ground.

  Matthew moved nearer still. Now he could see the matted hair over the reddened eyes, the glint of sunlight on the dark and glossy horns.

  He moved nearer.

  The bull tossed its head, standing its ground.

  I shall have to fire after all, he thought. He cocked the rifle, the click of the mechanism loud in the still air. The bull’s feet shifted uneasily.

  I will move you, he thought. He shifted his rifle to his left hand, snatched his hat from his head with his right and waved it in the air, yelling at the top of his voice.

  The bull’s nerve broke. It turned and ran, the herd following.

  Matthew wiped the sweat from his face and followed, riding hard. The herd poured downhill towards the lower ground, Matthew right behind them. Without turning his head he was aware that Tom and Charlton had joined him.

  The three men rode their snorting horses sliding and slipping down the steep defile. The air was full of the lowing of the cattle, the thunder of their hooves.

  The defile opened up into the plain. The herd poured out in a brown tide. Matthew galloped alongside Charlton. The older man, his face a mask of brown dust, looked across at him.

  ‘Get out to the left!’ Matthew yelled. ‘We’ve got to keep them together. If they scatter we’ll have the devil’s job collecting them again.’

  Charlton raised his hand in acknowledgement and put spurs to his horse, swerving away to the left. Tom was crouched low in the saddle, hat flying on its lanyard behind his head. Matthew galloped alongside him.

  ‘Take the right-hand side,’ Matthew shouted above the thunder of the hooves. ‘Keep ’em together.’

  Riding alone, Matthew was so close to the mob that the flanks of the rearmost animals brushed him on either side. The air was thick with dust, clogging the corners of his eyes and settling like flour in his throat and lungs.

  Barely visible through the billowing dust, a dingo broke cover and streaked across the front of the mob.

  The cattle swerved.

  Matthew was caught in a torrent of horns, tossing
heads, bellowing and charging bodies. He could do nothing but go with them, fighting frantically to stay mounted; a mistake here meant death.

  There was the sound of a shot, followed a moment later by another. The mob slowed and stopped.

  Danger past, Matthew’s knees were so weak he could barely sit his mount. Hands trembled on the reins as he worked his way out of the suddenly placid cattle. Charlton rode up, his face and body plastered with dust. ‘You all right?’

  ‘I was too close.’ Matthew could not altogether keep the tremor out of his voice. ‘When they changed direction I was trapped in the middle of them.’

  Charlton nodded but said nothing.

  Tom rode up. He, too, was barely recognisable under the covering of dust that masked his face and body. ‘My God‚’ he said, ‘for a moment there I thought I was going to be taking them north by myself.’

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ Matthew said.

  ‘They stopped,’ Charlton told him.

  ‘I know they stopped. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Cattle make their own rules,’ Charlton told him.

  Tom said, ‘Charlton rode in front of them and fired a couple of shots. That’s why they stopped.’

  Matthew stared at the older man incredulously. ‘You rode in front of that mob?’

  Charlton grinned sheepishly. ‘You’re my ticket to the interior. Couldn’t let nuthin happen to you, could I?’

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t take you anyway,’ Matthew said. ‘If you’re crazy enough to do something like that, who knows what you might get up to next.’

  ‘Teach you riding lessons might be a start,’ Charlton told him. ‘How not to get yourself caught up in a stampede.’

  They both knew that Charlton had saved Matthew’s life, that he might have died himself in doing it, but neither of them would ever say so.

  ‘If the pair of you have finished yapping‚’ Tom said, ‘maybe we can get these damn beasts back to the run.’

  They rode on, slowly now. Matthew could still taste dust on his lips but now the air was clear. It was as hot as ever: the sun seemed scarcely to have moved since he started down the draw. He could see the distant line of trees that skirted his property. The sun was bright and clear, the sky blue. The grey-green leaves of the gum trees hung motionless, the ground beneath them dappled with patches of shadow. He was alive, unharmed, and the plain stretched away invitingly towards the northwest.