Love in the Outback

by Deb Hunt

  Once I got over my fear of the unknown, I grew to love the desert too. An elemental place of earth, stone, heat, light, dust and sky, it could be fierce and brutal in forty-five-degree heat, and utterly beautiful when the heat dissipated and evening light softened the landscape. There was a weight and shape to the silence out in the desert. On winter afternoons the coming night lurked behind the hills, shadows lengthening on the ground as the sun slid towards the horizon. On still days you could feel the air give way as you stepped through it, gravity pressing close.

  In my first year in Broken Hill Sturt’s desert peas sprang up on the sandy hills in great clumps, like alien characters from Doctor Who. They stood upright on runners, tall and erect with watchful red and black eyes: meerkats on sentry duty. Word went around that another batch had sprung up off the road that led to the Living Desert and Sculpture Park; turn left after the first dirt track, someone would say, and they’re just over the hill, or try beyond the rise where the mountain bike track meets the road to Menindee. The location changed each time, as if desert peas had the ability to uproot themselves at night, march silently across the moonlit landscape and settle in a new location. By morning they would be standing ready to meet the dawn, watchful and, quite frankly, weird. If Dick Turpin were to be reincarnated and come back as a flower he’d be a desert pea, no question.

  Viewed from a distance, Broken Hill was a dirty brown smudge surrounded by desert. Up close, it dazzled. In early November, jacaranda trees lining Morgan Street traced a lacy pattern of lilac against a whip-cracking blue sky, blossoms piled into drifts below. At other times of the year there were saturated blooms of magenta bougainvillea, gum trees flowering in candy floss bunches of salmon, rose, snow white and burnt ochre, pink peppercorn trees in Sturt Park, while roses bloomed practically all year.

  Summer was a challenge; there was no point pretending otherwise. I left the secateurs in the sun one day then picked them up and tucked them under my arm while I reached for a weed. I bore the burn marks for days. Only the arrival of shadecloth to protect the veggie garden, coupled with kindly shadows cast by a majestic lemon gum tree, stopped the tender plants from scorching in forty-five-degree heat that could sometimes last for days.

  I had missed Sydney when I first arrived, but if I was honest, life in a big city often gave me a sense of being left behind, of not doing enough or seeing enough, uneasy at a pace that allowed no time for reflection and no pause in the frenetic dash to get somewhere and be someone. Broken Hill didn’t expect anything of me; it simply accepted me, which meant I didn’t expect too much of myself. I learnt to relax.

  I’d always thought routine was boring, an indication of a life that lacked interest, but in Broken Hill I learnt what comfort and reassurance routine can bring. Weekends were slow and measured: fish and chips on a Friday night, brunch with friends on Saturday, a swim in the pool, reading the papers, catching a film, watching the footy, a spot of gardening, a barbecue in a creek bed if the weather allowed, then back to work Monday morning and do it all again the following weekend. It was a quiet rhythm I grew to love.

  The peace and the space were just what I needed to complete the book about Jane. Although far from being the backwater I was expecting, Broken Hill turned out to be a vibrant hub of activity. There was no shortage of workshops I could (and did) attend – throwing pots on Wyman Street, polymer clay jewellery making with Wendy Moore, figure drawing with Robert, creative writing with Rae and play writing, acting and directing with Short + Sweet. I could have learnt to play the ukelele like Sue and Lisa, joined a bush walking group with Ann, taken quilting lessons, photography classes, learnt lead lighting – there were dozens of things to do.

  The remoteness of Broken Hill attracts all kinds of interesting people and I forged friendships that were all the sweeter for being so unexpected. Among the group who made regular sorties to the desert for a creek bed barbecue were artists, administrators, doctors, university lecturers, researchers, a retired florist, a schoolteacher and an occupational therapist. Not quite what I was expecting.

  The sense of community worked closer to home too. I’d normally cross the road to avoid a Harley-Davidson biker, especially one as imposing as Gary our next-door neighbour, but he and his wife, Ellen, were gentle, considerate people of unfailing kindness.

  I learnt to cope with the spiders and locusts that were quickly followed by a plague of crickets then hordes of mice and thousands of small black beetle things. ‘No idea what they are, love,’ said the shop assistant in Big W as she swept them off the counter. ‘We’ve all got ’em. They’ll be gone soon.’ We were all in it together.

  Apart from the occasional workshop there was little to distract me from the task I’d set out to complete, and nowhere to run and hide when issues came up in the relationship with CC. It was simply a matter of working through them.

  My pack of Tarot cards was gathering dust on top of the bookcase and I stopped looking for signs and symbols. Gradually, inexorably, I started to appreciate the beauty and sense of community that can be found everywhere you look in Broken Hill.

  It was puddings that really brought it home.

  chapter twenty-five

  Steam rose from the bank of boiling coppers like a dragon exhaling its breath.

  ‘How many have you got in there? Was that sixteen or seventeen?’

  ‘Seventeen, due out at ten thirty.’

  June lifted the lid, checked the water levels and then stirred the puddings bobbing in the copper. Her outline was swallowed by steam. Was it just me or would the thought of standing in front of a bank of boiling coppers all day (without air-conditioning) make most people check their diaries and find they were otherwise engaged? It was thirty-five degrees outside, at least forty-five inside, and I couldn’t see anything in that steaming, sweaty kitchen. I certainly couldn’t see the point of spending the best part of two weeks making 2000 Christmas puddings when there had to be quicker and much easier ways of raising money. I would normally be the first heading for the door but I didn’t want to lose face in front of the Broken Hill Women’s Auxiliary, most of whom looked to be in their sixties, seventies and eighties, so I stayed put. Words like resilience and fortitude didn’t even come close.

  ‘You’ll need a hat,’ said pudding convener Margaret, handing me a blue plastic hat.

  ‘Mind your backs, another batch coming through,’ said a voice behind me as an identical blue hat emerged from the steam, attached to someone pushing a supermarket trolley full of mounds of calico-wrapped parcels.

  ‘Copper number nine,’ said June, her disembodied voice rising from the mist.

  Olwyn took pity on me. ‘It’s a bit hot in here, why don’t you join the pleating team?’ she said, steering me out of the kitchen and into the preparation room next door where trestle tables buckled under the weight of boxes of mixed fruit, cartons of butter and margarine, sacks of flour, crates of brandy and thousands of cartons of eggs. Six hundred metres of white calico had been washed, ironed and torn into nineteen-inch squares, each square waiting to be dusted with flour and then draped onto the worn metal scoop of an old-fashioned set of scales. Those scales wouldn’t have looked out of place in a greengrocer’s shop in the 1930s.

  ‘What time’s smoko?’

  ‘About nine.’

  ‘Coming through, mind your backs.’

  I stepped out of the way of the trolley and took a seat next to a laughing woman in a blue hat (Jenny), who was clutching what looked to be a pair of pliers. She was sitting opposite another laughing woman in a blue hat (Val), who was pleating calico. I could have stood next to either of them in a supermarket queue and not known who they were; we all looked indistinguishable in our blue plastic hats. Team Pudding.

  My first job as a novice was to take bent pieces of steel wire and bend them into a different shape (another novice further up the production line had bent them into the wrong shape, apparently). I was a fan
of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs and I could have sworn I’d seen those exact same lengths of wire being used by builders to hold concrete foundations together.

  ‘What will you do with the wire?’ I asked. Jenny showed me by twisting a piece around the top of a calico-wrapped pudding, grabbing the ends with what looked like a pair of pliers (but wasn’t) and yanking hard.

  Within minutes my fingers were tingling and blackened. Everywhere I looked, women in aprons and blue hats were hard at work. An immaculately attired woman who looked to be in her early seventies with impeccable make-up and a spotlessly clean pinny (Pam had been on pudding duty for forty-six years) was weighing and measuring ingredients for the next batch of puddings. A woman with a ready smile and thick black hair that filled her blue hat (Cynthia) was mixing fruit, while Julie was cracking eggs. When June wasn’t stirring puddings, she was softening butter over a steaming bucket of boiling water to get the exact consistency for the temperamental industrial-sized mixer that Maxine was in charge of, and Annie was elbow-deep in pudding mix, squeezing the next batch of sticky goo through her fingers.

  A softly spoken woman with crow’s-feet radiating out from her smiling eyes (Marie) sat quietly in the corner dusting individual sheets of calico with flour so Val (keeper of the scales and mistress of weights and measures) could drape each sheet onto the metal scoop and plop a precise one-kilo dollop of pudding mix into the middle, time after time after time. Val had been standing at those scales for decades, Maxine had been on mixing duty for more than thirty years and Jenny had been yanking metal ties for just as long. Everywhere I looked it was the same story of loyal devotion.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked Jenny.

  ‘Wiawera Station.’

  ‘Is that far?’

  ‘About an hour and a half out of town.’

  Pudding production had started at seven that morning so Jenny must have been up well before dawn. It was the same for many of the women who lived on stations scattered across far western New South Wales.

  Preparations had begun months before with label making, calico tearing (cutting the fabric didn’t give the same effect), wire snipping and almond chopping. You know that sprinkle of spice that goes into a Christmas pudding? They needed four kilos of nutmeg alone, the same again of mixed spice, sixty litres of brandy, 740 kilos of dried fruit . . . the list went on and on. There were order forms to prepare and send, rosters of volunteers to organise, postage and packing to think about.

  Pudding production was undoubtedly the crowning glory of the Broken Hill Women’s Auxiliary’s fundraising efforts for the RFDS and it was an awe-inspiring achievement, with over 2000 calico-wrapped puddings produced by hand in less than two weeks. But why? Why would a group of sensible mature-aged women put themselves through such arduous, back-breaking, labour-intensive, sweat-inducing work, year in year out? There had to be easier ways of raising money, surely? The demonstration of support for the RFDS through a sacrificial process of such epic proportions absolutely mystified me.

  As the morning wore on agile hands swiftly removed each calico parcel from the scales. A line of women – Helen, Coral, Margaret, Sandy, Barbara, Jenny, Pauline, Lynne and so many more whose names were lost in a cloud of flour – shaped each ball of sticky pudding mix into a mound, sprayed it with water, then pleated the calico around the solid mass, deftly pulling and tweaking it into shape with experienced fingers. A steel tie was partly closed around the top, then more hands – sometimes Jack’s, the only man who seemed to have made it onto the pudding production line – linked a heavy puller under the steel tie and yanked it tight.

  The pudding passed down the line for more tweaking, patting and pulling before Val gave it a final check and plopped it into the bottom of the supermarket trolley. Pudding convener Margaret, an unflappable woman with endless slow-burn energy, wheeled it through to the kitchen to the waiting June, Julie and Sharon, whose excitable enthusiasm reminded me of a spaniel eager for a walk. There was a worrying moment when Sharon lowered a pudding into a copper of boiling water and mistakenly plunged her fingers into the broiling fatty swirl at the same time. She sat with her hand in a bucket of iced water to reduce the scald, and work continued regardless.

  ‘Remember that year all the puddings went mouldy because of the rain?’

  ‘What about that old tin shed we used to work in? That wasn’t much fun when it hit forty degrees.’

  ‘What about that beast of a mixer?’

  There was a peal of laughter from Maxine who told me her face would get so splattered with pudding mix she couldn’t see through her glasses to drive home. The sense of camaraderie was tangible and there was no telling any of us apart in the dense steam and blue plastic hats: we were all in it together.

  The talk moved on to pipe work.

  ‘Look at that automatic drainage, fantastic,’ said June.

  ‘Perilya installed waste pipes last year,’ Olwyn explained. ‘We have to empty the coppers at the end of each day and until those pipes were installed we used to catch the water in a bucket, then pour it down the sink.’

  I imagined them catching gushing streams of boiling, fatty water in a fleet of buckets and ferrying them Fantasia-like across the room. It would have been sweaty, slippery, dangerous work. There was no charge for the new pipes, not when it was for the Broken Hill Women’s Auxiliary and the RFDS.

  As each batch of puddings was lowered into the bubbling water, Margaret wrote the time on a soggy chart leaning against the wall. She made a note of the time the puddings were due out, the number of puddings in the copper and finally, in the all-important column at the end, the running total. It crept up as the day advanced – sixteen, thirty-three, forty-nine, sixty-six . . . it was a long way from the 2000-plus required.

  Work stopped for smoko, the Australian equivalent of morning tea, and again for lunch when we escaped the steam and sat in the sunshine, nibbling on lemon shortbreads that someone had found time to make, although goodness knows when.

  There was no slacking in between breaks. Olwyn kept track of orders as the temperature rose in the steaming kitchen and laughter mingled with the mist.

  June was one of the younger helpers (somewhere in her mid-sixties, I guessed) and she had just been awarded the Order of Australia for leading groups of cyclists across remote parts of Australia to raise money for the Flying Doctor.

  ‘You should come with us one day,’ she said, standing at one of the coppers, wearing two pairs of rubber gloves. After three hours in boiling water, the butter-rich puddings couldn’t be handled without a double protective layer.

  ‘Where did you go last time?’ I said, wary of my experience so far of cycling in the desert. I’m glad I asked. Their last trip was a seven-week ride of almost 4000 kilometres, from Broken Hill to Darwin.

  ‘You’re never too old for cycling,’ she said, lifting out a soggy pudding and patting it with a towel before squeezing out the excess moisture and adding it to a growing pile stored in a baby’s bath.

  Another line of women (where did they all come from?) wiped the puddings dry with an assortment of towels and tea towels. They cleaned the pleats, pulled out the calico ears, checked the ties and patted the precious bundles into perfectly round balls (flat-bottomed puddings were frowned upon).

  Having proved myself capable of bending bits of steel wire, I progressed later to pulling out the ears on the calico, and later still to wiping the cooked puddings as they came out of the steaming coppers. Months earlier someone had printed 2000 labels, placed each one inside a ziplock plastic bag, closed the bag, punched a hole through it, threaded a plastic-covered wire through the hole and twisted it ready to attach to a pudding. That was my next job. Once the labels were attached, the heavy puddings were carried next door in twos and threes, threaded onto butcher’s hooks (homemade, of course) and then finally hung in the storeroom to dry. The drying racks, made from sturdy metal poles over three metres lo
ng and lashed together with rope, reached from the floor to the ceiling. That was a lot of racks to fill.

  By going-home time at three thirty in the afternoon on my first day of volunteering, we had made 270 puddings. Only another 1630 to go . . .

  *

  There was something about the extreme self-sacrifice of the participants that mystified me. Leaving aside the hundreds of hours spent on pudding production itself, there was all the prep work and cleaning up every day, sweeping floors, scraping off wet flour paste stuck to benchtops, washing and drying dozens of towels, then packing puddings to be sent to Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and beyond, some even overseas.

  As a student I spent several months in Seville, in southern Spain, where I witnessed the religious fervour that hit town during Semana Santa, the Holy Week just before Easter. Whole suburbs vied for the right to bear the weight of statues of the Virgin Mary that were paraded through the streets on huge floats, resting on the backs of the Catholic faithful. For hours on end the followers swayed through the narrow streets thronging with worshippers, offering themselves to God. That same martyrdom seemed to be at play in Broken Hill, only in this case the offering was to the RFDS. If I counted up the hours spent on pudding production, even with a conservative estimate of say twenty volunteers working eight hours a day, I quickly reached over a thousand hours. Add the preparation, the clean up and the post-production sales operation and that total could easily have doubled.

  On the sweaty seventh day of pudding production I was on autopilot, pleating, prodding, cleaning and wiping. Jenny was sitting opposite, chatting with remarkable equanimity about the last major flood that swamped her remote property.