The Tartan Touch

by Isobel Chace

  “Do you think I can wear this?” I asked her.

  “Why not?” she answered coolly.

  It occurred to me with a sense of shock that she hadn’t recognised the tartan as being her own at all. She was probably accustomed to seeing both men and girls in tartan shirts, worn regardless of belonging to any clan.

  “You think it’s suitable?” I pressed her.

  “Mm,” she said. “Very nice. It’ll be nice too to have my own shirts back! Though I expect you’ll be borrowing them again, for two shirts are hardly going to keep you going! Is that all you’ve got?”

  “I’ll get some more when I next go to Cue,” I said.

  “You might do better at Marble Bar,” Mary suggested. “Are you ready? Because Andrew is pacing up and down outside as though he can’t wait to be gone!”

  I pulled on one of the Fraser shirts and the neat drill trousers, pushing the other shirt and some underwear into the small suitcase I had brought with me from the manse.

  “Is that all you’re taking?” Mary demanded.

  “I think so,” I said.

  She smiled at me, her red hair flaming in the early dawn light. “I brought you a stick of insect-repellent! You’ll need that!”

  I accepted it gratefully, stowing it away in my pocket. “My hat? Where’s my hat?” I demanded, beginning to panic at the thought of keeping Andrew waiting.

  “Here,” she said. She plonked it on to my head and gave me a push out of the bedroom door, carrying my suitcase herself. “Have a lovely time! But then Andrew will see to that!”

  How odd, I thought, that she should be so complacent about that! I tried to imagine it if it were the other way about. I should not, I knew, have been seeing her off. I rather think I should have been weeping. But then Mary Fraser was very sure of her own position. And why not? She had no reason to doubt Andrew’s love for her. And I? I was no competition at all, and I knew it.

  I felt like going back inside when I saw Andrew waiting, I was terribly conscious of the shirt I was wearing. He was sitting in the driving seat of the old ute, but he got out when he saw us coming and he made no sign that he had noticed I was wearing anything peculiar at all. He took my suitcase from Mary and threw it in the back of the ute, hugging her warmly.

  “Be seeing you,” he said to her.

  She nodded, her eyes filling with tears, "You won’t be away too long, will you?” she begged him.

  He shook his head. “’Bye, mate,” he said.

  “G’bye, Andy.” She gulped and, rather to my surprise, ran round the vehicle and kissed me warmly. “Everything will be fine, Kirsty! You’re not to worry about a thing!”

  “I won’t,” I said blankly.

  She kissed me again. “I’m so glad for you!” she said. And then she was gone, scuttling into the house with a wave of her hand.

  “Goodness,” I said.

  Andrew started up the old ute, waiting impatiently for me to get in, “You can twist us all around your little finger!” he teased me. “Even Mary! Even Margaret!”

  “But not you,” I said seriously.

  “Me most of all,” he joked. “How do you do it, Kirsty?”

  I sat very still. “I wouldn’t try to make you do anything you didn’t want to,” I assured him earnestly. “It wouldn’t be proper.”

  “Why not?” He sounded amused.

  I sought for some way of telling him—and not telling him, for he didn’t want to know how I felt about him.

  “Because you’re the Boss Cocky,” I said.

  He was silent for a minute, then he said, “I think Margaret would find that a somewhat quaint idea.”

  I dismissed Margaret with scarcely a thought. “She lacks confidence,” I said.

  “Does she, though?” he said slowly. “And how about you?”

  “Me?” I was astonished that he should inquire. “It doesn’t matter about me!”

  “You’re the Boss Cock’s wife!”

  “Maybe,” I agreed cautiously.

  “Well then, Kirsty Fraser?”

  “Kirsty MacTaggart,” I said with a sigh. “Sometimes I think I shall really be Kirsty MacTaggart until I die!”

  Andrew gave me a quick look out of the corner of his eye. “I shouldn’t count on it!” he said.

  “Maybe not,” I said easily, “I shan’t count on it either way.”

  “That’s my girl!” Andrew congratulated me. “Let’s wait and see what tomorrow brings.” His face creased, perhaps because he was driving straight into the rising sun. “I brought the wine and a barrel of apples,” he added smugly.

  “I’m afraid you would sooner have beer,” I said sadly.

  “That’s for my comfort! The wine and the apples are for yours!” he retorted.

  Because I was sick of love?

  There was a signpost along the northern highway telling us that a place called Ragged Hills was some five hundred miles north of Cue. How far we were going, I had no idea. Andrew pointed out the ‘flat tops’, the “pearling ground’ and the Racecourse. The two former were mining areas, or so I concluded; the latter was more interesting to me, for it was there that I was to ride Birrahlee, but just now there was very little to be seen.

  Shortly after that, Andrew said we had met with Mad Man’s Track, and would go straight on to the tin mine that he owned and where we would spend the night, before we took the road again, always northwards, to Marble Bar. The mulga, the trees of the bush that I had thought so dull when we had first driven to Mirrabooka, came very close to the road. In time, I thought, I would learn to distinguish between one area of the country and another, but now I would have been lost a hundred yards away from the old ute and Andrew. I could discern the faint perfume of the bush, a smell of pine and eucalyptus and endless open space. It would be a long time before I would be a bushwhacker’s wife with a nose for survival in the Outback.

  But just as I was thinking that the mulga would be with us all the way, it cleared abruptly, giving way to some iron-stoned gibber flats, where there was hardly any vegetation at all.

  “It isn’t far from here to the mine,” Andrew said suddenly, “Just the other side of Nannine.”

  Nannine was only two hours away from Cue, but it was now another ghost town, full of empty houses and lost dreams. The hotel was still open, waiting for any casual visitor who cared to stop on his way through, but otherwise there was nobody to be seen, only dust and peeling paint.

  A little further down the road, Andrew turned off the northern highway on to a side road. The dust rose in a scarlet plume behind us, announcing our progress fifty miles away.

  “The mine is over there,” Andrew said eventually.

  I looked where he was pointing, expecting to see the traditional mine-shaft similar to those that dotted the countryside. But this mine, Andrew told me, was practically unique. There was only Moolyella, up by Marble Bar, that was at all similar, even though it was a much more valuable property, though even there it was no longer profitable for white people to mine there.

  Nor, it seemed, was the Fraser mine. It lay in scenery so bleak that I wondered that anyone should stay there. It was a brown, dusty, and totally desolate place, where a few Aboriginal women laboured in the broiling heat.

  “If we shut it down, there would be no work for them here at all,” Andrew remarked grimly, taking one look at my face.

  “What do the men do?” I asked him.

  “Some of them work as stockmen on the surrounding stations. Otherwise there’s nothing.”

  “Couldn’t they work here?” I swallowed, trying to shift the dust out of my throat without much success.

  Andrew shook his head. “Only the women have the knack of yandying,” he told me, his eyes laughing at me because I so plainly didn’t understand what he was talking about. “They won’t mind your taking a look.” We walked over to where a group of women were working. They were all very pleased to see Andrew. Some of them came running over the desolation where they worked to greet him.

>   “To Boss Cocky!”

  “Hullo, Jenny,” he answered at once. Apparently he knew every one of them by name, and most of their children as well. “I’ve brought my wife to see you!”

  The women laughed. “Miz Fraser,” they said dutifully. “Miz Kirsty,” they added. They were very well informed.

  But they wouldn’t take long away from their work. In a few minutes they were back, gathering the alluvial tin crystals together with the dust and separating the crystals by yandying. From time immemorial, going right back to Dreamtime, the women had used the same method to separate the yandy grass seeds from the husks. Now they used it on metals, with immense skill, using this same technique which had been passed on from mother to daughter all through the generations.

  It looked simple enough. They used a piece of tree-bark, about two feet long, or any convenient substitute that came to hand, which was called a coolamon. The woman would stand, with her feet slightly apart, filling her coolamon with some of the brown dust. Then she would revolve the dish, with a subtle, dexterous action forcing the lighter dust out of either end of the coolamon. The cassiterite tin ore is of a high specific gravity and is more apt to stay in the dish of bark and, with a quick twist of the wrist the heavier, black tin is deposited into an empty fruit can, and the woman starts all over again with another coolamon full of earth.

  “You want try?” Jenny asked me.

  She handed me her own coolamon and I did try, thinking that it couldn’t be much different from spinning yam on the end of a spool. My fingers were stiff, however, and most of the dirt fell out of the piece of bark, falling to the ground.

  “It’s a skill you have to be born to,” Andrew consoled me. “Even their men are clumsy and unable to yandy like the women can.”

  Jenny nodded, her black eyes gleaming. “Gins yandy good, men very bad,” she confirmed. “ ’Sides,” she added, “yandy tin easy, much more easy than yandy seeds!”

  It was strange, hard work, but as Andrew had said, there was no other. He paid them for each fruit-tin full of the alluvial tin crystals that they gathered. Although the weight varied from one ‘fruit’ to another, the women preferred it to any other system. They could earn more than a dollar for each ‘fruit’ and this went a long way to supporting their families in the humpies where they lived, shacks which consisted of a single room with a hardened dirt floor and walls of the same rusty colour as the ground where they worked by day.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Andrew said as we walked away from the mine.

  “It’s sinful!” I agreed.

  “They’ve been given a crook deal, no doubt about that! But new ways are being tried now. It’s too late for them to go back to their own ways. If they went back into the desert they would die, for they’ve forgotten most of the ways of their ancestors.”

  “Except how to yandy,” I said, as cheerfully as I could.

  “My word, yes. But they live on tinned meat now, not the fresh kangaroo meat they used to eat.”

  I scratched at the brown dust with the toe of my boot, noting with satisfaction that my new hat already looked less new than it had.

  “Do the humpies where they live have to be quite so dreary?” I wondered aloud. “Are they just feckless?”

  “No,” Andrew said finally. “They’re a lost people, and it’s mostly our fault.”

  I sighed, nodding my head wisely. Hadn’t I seen the way the crofters were leaving the land at home? “Ay,” I said, “it always is the fault of those who don’t live on the land. But dirt poverty is dirt poverty and has to be changed.”

  Andrew gave me an outraged look. “I live on the land!” he objected.

  I laughed softly to myself. “So you do,” I smiled. “So you do!”

  “I suppose it’s different,” he said.

  “Well, it is,” I insisted. “You can decide your own future for yourself, can’t you?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” was all he said.

  We drove away from the mine shortly after that, both of us silent and saddened by the hopelessness that followed in the wake of the dying mines and the ghost-towns.

  We headed straight for Meekatharra, which like Cue has survived the decline that followed the Murchison Gold Rush. There is still some mining there, but the town’s interests are now mainly pastoral. Here, the single track railway from Perth comes to an end. In a way, it’s the end of civilisation. Only the real Outback lay beyond.

  Andrew drove straight on, stopping only for further supplies of petrol and water.

  “It’s eight hundred miles from here to the Northern Territory,” he told me lazily, as we waited in the dying sun for the garage to finish filling the extra tanks in the back of the old ute.

  “And how many people?” I asked him.

  “Maybe a full score of white people.” His eyes met mine. “Are you afraid to be so alone with me?”

  “Of course not!” I exclaimed.

  “The MacTaggart courage?”

  I looked down at my Fraser shirt. “No,” I said briefly. “But there isn’t anything you want from me, is there?”

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” he asked gently.

  “Well, you know what I mean,” I said reasonably. “Four years, you said, and then I’d be free!”

  “Is freedom so important to you?” I thought he sounded a shade bitter and wondered why. Didn’t everyone want to make their own decisions and their own way in life? Most people, I amended, for I knew now that I did not. I would have been quite content to follow Andrew’s decisions for the rest of my life.

  “I—I’ve never tried it,” I stammered.

  He slapped the bonnet of the ute. “No,” he said. “I suppose it was a daft idea!”

  “What was?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  He took a wad of notes out of his pocket and paid for the petrol and water, “Anything else, sport?” the attendant asked him. Andrew shook his head. He leaped into the driving seat and started the engine, so that I had to scramble into the seat beside him in case he drove off without me.

  “We could stay at the hotel here if you prefer it to camping out,” he said sternly, as he slipped the engine into gear.

  I shook my head. I knew just what it would be, staying in a hotel. The beer was inevitably more palatable than the local bore water, and Andrew would soon find half a dozen people he knew and off they would go to the bar, while I should be left kicking my heels all evening.

  “I’d prefer to camp,” I said with decision.

  “Okay,” he answered.

  “I prefer my own cooking,” I went on uneasily.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Besides, we have everything with us. And—and Mary didn’t mind!”

  He looked puzzled, but he said nothing. We sped along the corrugated surface of Mad Man’s Track, until it began to get dark and sheer fatigue made me want to set up camp before very long.

  The mulga had given way to spinifex, a tough kind of grass that grew in tussocks on either side of the road. I thought the soil was mostly clay, but all round the horizon were remnants of some of the oldest rocky mountains in the world, known locally as ‘breakaways’. They were covered with red laterite which has protected the granite beneath from crumbling away, eroded by the sun and wind, as the rest of the granite tablelands which have long since fallen away.

  It was desperately hot. When we at last came to a stop, even the slight wind the motion of the car had provided was stilled and there was nothing to break up the cloud of heat that settled over us. I sat on the ground and watched Andrew dig a hole in the ground and light the fire in it, where it would cause no damage to the dry grass all round us.

  “It gets windy later on,” Andrew grunted. “I brought a couple of windproof sleeping-bags. I don’t think we’ll need much else.”

  I wondered if we would even need them.

  “Andrew,” I said solemnly, “does Margaret have anything in particular to say to Mary?”

&nbs
p; “I think it’s the other way round,” he said.

  “Oh. I suppose Margaret still wants Mary to go to Perth?”

  He gave me a hard look and I wondered what he was thinking. “Mary has her own life mapped out,” he said at last. “I think she wants to persuade Margaret that she knows what she’s doing.”

  “As she’s already persuaded you?” I murmured.

  “Right,” said Andrew. “Now can we talk about something else?”

  I nodded, feeling quite miserable and not knowing what to do about it. “I’ll get the bags out,” I said.

  The old ute had been very well packed. Apart from the cans of petrol and water, there was enough food to keep us going for days, the barrel of apples that Andrew had told me about, sitting precariously on the top. The sight of them made me want to cry. I sniffed hard.

  The sleeping-bags were tucked in down one side. I pulled them out and laid them neatly out on the ground. One of them was considerably larger than the other.

  “That belonged to my parents,” Andrew told me, appearing suddenly round the side of the ute. “They used it whenever they went camping together.”

  I looked away from it, thinking it not quite decent to dwell on the matter.

  “I think you’d better have it,” I said. “You’re bigger than I am,”

  He leaned against the back of the ute and pulled his hat down over his eyes. “So I am,” he said.

  I had to push past him to get to the stores of food. He felt very hard, like a coiled spring. I wished he would go away, for I found it unsettling having him so close to me.

  He put a hand on the back of my shirt and I jumped visibly.

  “Did Mary talk you into it?” he asked me.

  “T-talk me into wh-what?”

  “I thought you knew. That’s the Fraser tartan you’re wearing!”

  For a wild moment I considered denying any knowledge of any tartan except the one I had been born to.

  “It—It—” I began. “There wasn’t a great choice—”

  He felt the cotton material between his fingers, his brow creased thoughtfully.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind!” I finished.