Love in the Outback

by Deb Hunt

  CC looked up from his computer when I tapped on the study window.

  ‘Do I need to worry about spiders?’ I asked, indicating the bags of compost at my feet. CC shook his head and I started shovelling compost onto the sunny strip of garden that might one day be a veggie patch. Closer examination of one of the bags revealed a tiny speck of spider clinging to the plastic, half the size of a small fingernail. I went back to the window.

  ‘What if I find a really small spider with a dash of red on it?’

  The sound of the screen door slamming against the wall was like a sonic boom – I swear CC reached me before I’d finished the sentence.

  ‘Show me,’ he said.

  I pointed to the small spider and CC grabbed a stick, knocked the unassuming creature off the bag and stamped on it with his RM Williams boot, grinding it into the dirt for good measure.

  ‘Oh, so, “Spiders aren’t something to worry about,” you said. “Perfectly harmless creatures, not worth bothering with,” oh no, what a lot of fuss over noth –’

  ‘Frosty.’

  His voice cut through the sarcasm I couldn’t contain. It was the look on his face that spooked me.

  ‘That was a red-back. If you see any more of those, you should kill them.’

  How could something so tiny be so venomous? Like everyone, I’d heard of red-back spiders but I’d never actually seen one before. It must have been a while since CC had spent any time in his garden because by the end of the afternoon I’d found nine more. There were red-backs behind the brick barbecue, under the rim of a pot plant, hidden in the handle of the hose reel and one even tucked into a corner of the aluminium frame on the bathroom window. The webs were easy to spot – messy and strung low to the ground – so at least they gave the game away, but each new discovery put a dampener on my enthusiasm for growing vegetables. Especially when several days later I found one of the telltale webs stretched between my side of the bed and the bedside table. CC was away so I slept on the sofa. (The spider was long gone but the toxic fumes from a full can of fly spray took a while to clear). ‘It must have come in on your clothes,’ CC said when he got back. That didn’t reassure me.

  Most of my ideas about Broken Hill were based on Kenneth Cook’s brilliant novel Wake in Fright, made into a film in the early 70s, that depicted Broken Hill (called Bundanyabba but everyone knew it was the Hill) as a lawless place of excessive drinking, out-of-control gambling, alcohol-fuelled violence, inescapable dust and searing heat. The main character (a prissy young man from Sydney, no less) gets sucked into a game of two-up, loses all his money and slides into a swampland of moral turpitude, gratuitous violence and self-degradation – not the best book to have read before I moved to Broken Hill. Maybe I should have watched The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert instead.

  As if to reinforce the extensive research I’d done, on my first shopping trip to Woolies a sunburnt grizzly in leather chaps, Akubra hat, cowboy boots and grubby denim work shirt joined the queue. He had a hunting knife tied to his belt that would have made Crocodile Dundee weep with envy.

  I was ready to hate the place, prepared to grit my teeth and get through it, all the time secretly thinking I’d give up after a few months and flee back to Sydney. (I wasn’t the only one; CC has since admitted he gave me six months, at most.)

  *

  ‘You know what? You’re not getting the full Broken Hill experience.’

  ‘What am I missing?’

  ‘A creek-bed barbecue. Come on, it won’t get dark for a couple of hours.’

  We found a battered old saucepan in the shed, its handle replaced by a length of twisted wire looped over the top. I stood back, worried about red-backs.

  CC muttered as he searched. ‘It’s in here somewhere.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The frying pan.’

  Worryingly, he found the frying pan in a kitchen cupboard: a blackened, barely recognisable thing encrusted with layers of carbon.

  ‘Did you know burnt food causes cancer?’

  ‘Live a little, Frosty.’

  He was right, of course. I should stop worrying about snakes and spiders, and the isolation and open space, or I wouldn’t get the full Broken Hill experience. The problem was, I wasn’t sure I wanted the full Broken Hill experience. The prospect of heading out to a lonely creek bed for a barbecue in the dead of night (sorry, early evening) was the inland equivalent of swimming in Sydney Harbour, something I’ve never liked doing. Even in a sheltered bay, you don’t know how deep the water is or what’s circling unseen under the dark, glistening surface. The desert gave me that same feeling. There was something unnerving about being surrounded by so much empty space.

  Fifteen minutes later the boot of the car was crammed with camping chairs, an axe, a shovel and an esky with water, steak, eggs, bread and oil. A cardboard box held a frying pan, a saucepan and the makings of tea and coffee, and before you could say ‘drover’s dog’, we were on a dirt road heading out of town, with no mobile signal and not another car in sight. It all happened very quickly.

  ‘You know, it’s odd, I dreamt we went out to the desert last night,’ said CC.

  ‘That’s weird.’

  ‘And a bunch of thugs attacked us.’

  ‘Not good.’

  ‘I shot one of them to stop him attacking you.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I would, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kill someone to protect you.’

  That was the closest CC got to romance. I think he thought it would reassure me. It had the opposite effect and silence seemed the only appropriate response. Moments later we veered off the dirt road onto a barely recognisable track, heading for a line of trees in the distance. The sand grew softer as the silence stretched on. CC stopped the car a short way from the trees and the silence settled around us like a shipwreck. The only signs of life were occasional sheep droppings.

  ‘We’d better walk from here. We don’t want to get bogged.’

  No, we don’t, I thought, especially as we have no mobile phone signal and you’re a potentially murderous driver armed with an axe and a shovel in the back of the car. You could kill someone with that axe and then dig a grave in the sand with the shovel and no one would be any the wiser. See what I mean? Empty space made me nervous.

  The creek bed was about fifteen metres wide and there were clear signs that water must have cut through this section of desert once, carving out clean walls of sand over a metre high. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ coolibah trees lined the creek bed, looking more dead than alive with their twisted, spindly limbs and elongated leaves. In the height of summer, you’d be glad of any shade you could get out here, and as we drew closer I could see there was life in the ancient trees yet, which was more than could be said for the rusting heap of metal just visible around a bend in the creek. Finding an abandoned car in an otherwise pristine environment, with no other sign of human intervention, was bizarre.

  ‘Probably got washed down here in the last flood,’ said CC.

  ‘Flood?’ I spun around and scanned the horizon. ‘What’s to stop it flooding now?’

  ‘Relax, Frosty. The water that’s on its way will take weeks to reach us.’

  We found a suitable spot to make camp and settled our small blue camping chairs into the bed of soft sand, their backs against the carved wall opposite the trees. The chairs looked insignificant in such a vast landscape, like specks of ink mistakenly dropped onto a sheet of white paper.

  ‘Hang on.’

  CC climbed the bank and disappeared towards the car, leaving me alone with the flies in that hot, silent evening. I was instantly intimidated by the silence and empty space: fearful of embracing it, yet sensing that if I could, my soul might expand and grow. A quiet, natural beauty resonated out there. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all
ye need to know.’ If I could just breathe deeply I might glimpse the harmony there was to be found within that silence. Was that why white space in a painting or silence on stage could sometimes feel so satisfying?

  CC reappeared carrying the shovel. ‘Is that for protection?’ I asked. Sometimes I like winding him up.

  ‘Frosty!’

  He dug a shallow hole in the sand to form a fire pit and we collected wood, dragging dead branches thick as our thighs over the soft sand. We filled the depression with leaves and twigs and held a single match briefly to the dry leaves, which ignited with a whoosh of combusting eucalyptus oil. It was a reminder of the deadly potential of bushfires. There was no danger of that out here, though. We stoked the fire, lay a heavy branch across the middle and settled into our camp chairs, watching it burn through as the sun sank lower in the sky behind the line of coolibah trees.

  A kingfisher made a brief appearance, making me wonder about an imminent Noah-like flood but it was too silent for that. We were alone apart from him, a clutch of galahs and a squawking cockatoo. Blackened tree branches stretched against an ink-splashed sky as charcoal smudges of cloud appeared, streaked in pink, yellow and orange.

  Soon the glowing embers of the fire were perfect for frying steak and eggs so we settled the carbon-encrusted frying pan onto the fire and CC poured water into the battered saucepan, poking a stick through the wire loop to rest it on a glowing log. We were brewing the billy, Broken Hill-style.

  Flies were a constant irritation – we must have looked like cartoon campers, heads enveloped in a cloud of flies, bodies and legs just visible underneath – yet I wasn’t remotely tempted to suggest we go and sit in the car. With CC by my side, the emptiness wasn’t intimidating, it was beautiful.

  We ate quickly, outsmarting the flies that clustered at our lips. An egg sandwich had never tasted so good. The flies disappeared as soon as the sun did and when the first clutch of stars appeared I marvelled at how clear they were. It was just the beginning. Over the next twenty minutes the sky darkened and the Milky Way revealed itself in a dusting of stars that looked impossibly numerous, like fine powder thrown across the face of the universe, as clear as a child’s breath on a cold winter morning. The pinpricks of light surpassed any dazzling firework display I’d seen in Sydney.

  As the fire died down, we packed up the cooking gear, folded the chairs, doused the embers and stood together in silence, arms wrapped around each other, heads craned back to take in the beauty above us.

  We both saw it, a shooting star, and without thinking I made a wish. I wish I could spend the rest of my life with CC. The words were in my head before I had time to judge or retract them.

  chapter twenty-four

  In the cold light of day the thought that CC and I might spend the rest of our lives together vanished, and the same old questions came flooding back. Did we really belong together? After so many years of desperately yearning to be with someone (usually someone unattainable), was this it? I was with the lovely CC and I felt scratchy and irritable. Why? Leaving aside the fact that I was living in a bungalow in Broken Hill, largely furnished in the equivalent of a pair of crimplene trousers, there was nothing wrong with our relationship. The heady rush of passion I’d been addicted to in the past had been replaced by a pervasive sense of wellbeing and peace: emotions so alien they made me feel anything but peaceful. CC picked up on my unease.

  ‘Do you want your money back, Frosty?’

  ‘Oh don’t be silly, of course I don’t.’

  But did I? I felt isolated and alone. Broken Hill was a two-day drive from friends in Sydney and I was struggling with that sense of isolation. Yes, it gave me time to write, but it also made me totally reliant on CC. I’d never been in that situation before and I wasn’t sure I liked it. I hid my confusion in the Barrier Daily Truth, where an ad in the classified section caught my eye.

  Layer pullets, commercial crossbreds, not debeaked, 12 wks (red, black, white) $14.00.

  ‘What’s a layer pullet?’

  ‘A chook. A young one.’ CC looked up from The Australian. ‘Hens,’ he said helpfully and went back to reading the paper.

  Eggs were one of the few sources of protein we could agree on. I liked the thought of chickens roaming free in the back garden, scratching in the dirt or pecking at the grass, stopping occasionally to ruffle their feathers or lay another egg. Maybe this was the romantic dream of outback Australia I’d been searching for? I had a sudden picture of me in a straw hat with a basket on my arm, collecting fresh eggs every day. Chicken manure would fertilise the vegetable beds and we’d have freshly laid eggs with creamy yellow yolks for breakfast every day. Such an idyllic picture of rural bliss lifted my spirits instantly. Maybe chooks would help me survive the rigours of Broken Hill.

  *

  I’m a tip tragic, into waste in a big way. Not the junk CC worries about (if a bond’s junk, why buy it?); I’m into the real thing, and there’s plenty of it in Broken Hill. When it came to building a chook shed I drove straight to the tip, a fly-blown, fetid wasteland on the edge of town.

  Residents of Broken Hill simply empty the contents of their trailers, trunks and pick-ups straight onto a patch of dirt bordered by chicken wire about two kilometres out of town, not far from the cemetery. Clouds of black crows circle overhead in ominous herald of unnatural deeds, barely waiting until the drivers have hurried back into their cars and slammed the doors before they swoop. It’s like the end of the world, a post-apocalyptic nightmare rivalling anything you might see in Mad Max, with piles of rubbish strewn across the desert and no visible means of preventing it being blown all the way to Adelaide.

  I loved it.

  To be fair, the bit I loved was a shed the size of a small aircraft hangar that was perched at the entrance. Inside it, and stretched beyond it on the hard-packed earth out the back, were treasures worthy of Steptoe and Son, a rag and bone man’s delight, plentiful enough to satisfy any junkie into serious junk. Someone – God knows who or how – had fought off the circling crows, picked their way through the detritus that other people had discarded and separated out the bits that could be salvaged. They’d even sorted them into categories. The result was an emporium of waste, laid out on the baked red earth under an intense blue Broken Hill sky. It was beautiful.

  I picked up chicken wire, corrugated iron and bits of old timber, paid my five dollars and drove home to build a chook shed.

  ‘Who threw that rubbish on the lawn?’ CC remarked when he got home from work that night. I hadn’t got around to assembling the shed as yet and its parts were displayed on the lawn.

  ‘That,’ I said proudly, ‘is the makings of a chook shed.’

  ‘We’ve got a perfectly good one already.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Behind the rose bushes.’

  What I had thought was a makeshift storage area for logs and old timber turned out to be a chook shed. Several sheets of corrugated iron tacked against the fence formed a back wall; the sides were chicken wire and more sheets of iron on top formed a roof. (I hoped CC hadn’t paid for the materials; there were plenty out at the tip.) About a metre wide by two metres long and almost tall enough to stand up in, it had a soft floor of red earth. In short, the perfect chook shed. CC seemed pleased with the idea of getting chooks.

  ‘We used to keep them years ago,’ he said.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘As long as you know they’ll take a bit of looking after,’ he added.

  ‘Well I wasn’t expecting them to look after themselves,’ I said, slightly miffed at the idea his ex had also liked to keep chooks. I ordered four Red Leghorn crosses, to be delivered in three weeks’ time, along with a feed bin and a water container.

  A quick search through the second-hand section of Browzer’s bookshop on Argent Street – it rivalled the tip in its collection of treasures – revealed a section on animal husbandry and I paid $2.5
0 for a slim pamphlet on how to care for chooks. ‘They need somewhere safe to perch, nest and roost,’ I declared, already an expert on the dos and don’ts of chook husbandry without the faintest clue what the difference between perching, nesting and roosting might be. CC nodded. He probably knew it all anyway but it was worth reminding him. ‘And healthy, happy chickens can fight off disease,’ I said.

  ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘So they should be free range.’

  CC frowned. He looked as if he was about to object so I pointed to the booklet. ‘It says chickens like to roam.’

  ‘You’re the one who likes gardening.’

  I wasn’t sure what he meant and I got the sense there was more he could add so, before he could say anything else, I turned the page. Our chickens would be free range and I would brook no argument. ‘It says here that the more space chooks have, the happier and healthier they will be. And healthy, happy chooks lay more eggs.’

  ‘Whatever you think, Frosty.’

  The chook shed was (apparently) where the girls would perch during the day when they wanted a rest from all that free ranging, so having cleared the chook shed of old logs and dug over the dirt floor, I went in search of something they could perch on. The vast quantity of rubbish I’d dragged back from the tip contained nothing suitable (which was a surprise, given how much there was).

  ‘There’s an old broom handle in the shed,’ said CC. ‘They can perch on that.’

  He retrieved the broom handle from the rafters and rammed it diagonally through the wire mesh sides. I was willing to concede CC had more practical experience than me in the whole business of chook husbandry but I couldn’t help feeling there was a flaw in his plan. I pictured four chooks flying up to perch (or nest or roost; I was yet to work those out) on a circular broom handle, then I pictured them trying to grip the smooth, circular surface as it started to revolve. I could see them scrabbling for purchase as the broom spun faster and faster until the inevitable happened and all four chooks were flung into a heap in the far corner.