Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  As soon as we got back to the property, although there were still miles to travel to the homestead, Gerry ‘felt’ there was something amiss. When we got even closer I realised it was strange that no one had come to meet us, seeing these men have an ear for the distant sound of any vehicle in that silent land. We got to the homestead and began unloading, and ‘the old soldier’ who did odd jobs came up. ‘He’s gone’, he said, ‘they took him.’ He had been drinking, but not much more than usual. ‘Took who?’ asked Gerry. ‘Teddy. The cops came and got him and took him up to Broome.’

  There had been an Aboriginal, a very handy man, who lived on the property and he stayed there throughout the Wet. He’d come to the kitchen to collect his meals and that was all I knew of him except that I had been told by the stockmen that he was banned from Broome. I had asked ‘the old soldier’ about Teddy and he had said ‘Oh Gawd, he can’t go back to Broome, you know, he blew a girl up’. ‘He what?’ I had said. ‘He blew a girl up, a nice girl she was too. He’s blown up lots of girls. The Blacks won’t let him back into Broome, they’re on the warpath after him. That’s why he stays here and works all the time.’ Gerry had been cross and I realised there was something that I wasn’t being told. Blowing up a girl? Oh, yes, I see. Not with dynamite!

  Gerry asked ‘Who alerted the cops to take him out?’ (off the property). And then it all came out. There had been an argument and ‘the old soldier’ had phoned Broome and said Teddy had gone mad with the drink and was swinging along the roof guttering with his hands and had pulled down part of the water spout. In the midst of his telling, Gerry said, as cold as I’d ever heard a man speak, ‘And you rang the cops?’ He turned and went up to the kitchen and I found him there when I came in. ‘You never call the cops on a man’ Gerry said to me. ‘You never do that.’

  A quaint thing had occurred with Teddy some weeks before and though Gerry had been angry about it I thought it was hilarious. In the terrible heat we were all sleeping out, the workmen down in their quarters, us on our cyclone wire stretchers at the homestead but outdoors under the huge shelter that was open on all sides.

  One goes to sleep quickly in those latitudes, partly from the hard work of the day and partly from the climate. Before I went to sleep I heard Gerry, over in the far side of the shelter, using the last of his radio batteries trying to find out the cricket scores of the match being played in England. The next I knew was that I was totally awake and totally still, totally alert. I couldn’t hear anything, the radio was turned off, I didn’t want to turn over towards Gerry in case my movement might provoke danger. I slowly opened my eyes and there it all was beside me. I let out an almighty yell and Gerry leapt up running, calling ‘What’s the matter Pat?’ On the other side of my bed there was Teddy, with all his blankets – and a grubby malodorous lot they were – and he in full dress of shirt and trousers. He had settled himself down on the concrete floor beside my bunk. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Gerry yelled and grabbed him. ‘By cripes, you’ll get it for this.’ I lay still under my sheet, unsure of what was happening, and the next I heard was Gerry calling to me, ‘It’s all right, Pat, don’t get upset, the stupid bastard, if you’ll pardon the expression, is only mad. Nothing else wrong with him.’

  I waited a few seconds, heard them begin to go off across the concrete with Gerry shouting threats all the way, and was then free to turn over and see what was happening. There was the funniest sight: Teddy was afraid of the dark. I knew that but didn’t know he needed to have someone near him every night, and this night ‘the old soldier’ had locked him out of his room in the quarters and Teddy was too afraid to stay alone and had merely come to me thinking to get a little human company. What I saw when I turned over was Gerry, a very big man, displaying a back view of a huge pink torso and buttocks in the moonlight, as naked as the day he was born, and Teddy staggering alongside him weighed down by his massive bundle of old coats, wheat bags, blankets, and a wool bale of straw. All the while Gerry, annoyed at his sleep being disturbed, was hitting him over the ears with his ten-gallon hat and Teddy was complaining that he ‘never knew nothing about no woman sleeping there’ and anyway, ‘she’s old’.

  Another night, still in the monsoon period and so we were therefore sleeping out of doors, I was again wakened but this time in total terror. It was a scream from the jungle around us. ‘Gerry!’ I bawled out across the shelter; I could see him already off his bunk. ‘What is it?’ ‘God knows’ said Gerry, and he had been in this wilderness for a lifetime. The screaming continued but all the time it was moving and seemed a little further away. Sometimes it was almost silent, then next would come the most blood-curdling screech and this continued until, little by little, it faded. Gerry called ‘Where did you see those little kittens today Pat?’ and I knew immediately – the big snake, the python that had crossed in front of me the previous day. Later I’d come on a batch of tiny wild kittens in a thick bush. I had put out my hand to entice them but the game little things had hissed and spat at me and I had left them. ‘The old soldier’ told me his version: ‘The python grabs them by the back so they can’t use their teeth or claws on his lips and he slowly digests them with …’ I didn’t wait to hear the end.

  This is the land of the baobabs (some call them ‘bottle trees’) with elephant-hide, bulbous, and grotesque; of great grasslands that wave twelve-feet high in the Wet, where brumbies scatter into the scrub when they hear a car, and wild cattle threaten to charge as you drive over their fenceless runs. For mile on mile the ranges melt from pale lavender to violet, from pink to the scarlet of congealed blood, rufous, harsh, barbaric and beautiful. When night comes it turns lustrous deep purple and exotic.

  In the Kimberley you sleep out under the stars if you’re travelling. My camp was in a circle of baobab trees, fat and leafless. Dust hid the setting sun and the colours of sunset passing through it lay in bars of colour. There was nothing to indicate the cause of this low-lying blanket, a vivid fog from horizon to sky, but the air told me I was not alone on the broad bronze plain. All sound was blotted out by the talking of flocks of rose-breasted galahs overhead, flying to the water at the bore near by. Numberless finches, budgerigars and cockatoos settled on the trees around the bore, decorating the bare limbs like clusters of green, yellow, pink and white flowers.

  The birds chattered and squabbled and pushed each other off their perches on the droll baobab branches until dusk. I could hear nothing from that distant blanket of dust, but an excitement was there. It filled the air around me. Suddenly a little donkey ran by, right beside my camp fire. A bell round his neck went clok-clok-clok. He brayed in ludicrous delight and scampered on to the bore.

  Then, there in the dusk and the dust and the last of the setting sun was a string of horses with a stockman taking them to water. The donkey was among friends. I ran to a big rock near the baobabs and climbed it. Sticking out of the top of the dust layer were the big ten-gallon stockmen’s hats and horses’ heads, and the horns of cattle tossing and dodging as stockmen rode the herd to settle it down for the night. Suddenly it was dark – it’s always sudden in the Kimberley – and with the darkness the birds abruptly stopped screeching and only then could I hear the complaining of five hundred head of cattle as they were brought into a tight circle.

  I travelled ‘soft’ by outback standards: I had a sleeping bag. Now, with the fire smouldering low I was comfortable, happy, but the excitement was still there. There were noises everywhere. Somewhere out there the dark was full of moving animals. I was never too sure whether animals would tread on a prostrate sleeper in the dark and still can’t believe they never do. There were noises everywhere. Clok-clok went a bell – surely scores of bells? I didn’t think of hobbles. The tinkling disappeared and came again. Then the tread of high-heeled boots and concertina leggings on the dirt track to the bore, past my head. A voice said ‘This bin good country. I bin walkem fifty mile. Plenty tucker. Bin catchem wallaby, emu, goanna, turkey. Plenty beef. You no starve here.�
�� The scrunch of footfalls faded away. The cattle were lowing, quietly now.

  And then it began. Gently, softly at first, the stockmen began to ‘sing’ the cattle, make them content and aware of the presence of men. If one beast became uncertain and panicked, the whole herd could have stampeded within seconds and no man could have stopped it. So, the stockmen ‘sing the cattle’.

  The words eluded me, the melody too, but inside my head the rhythm was pounding through from the ground beneath me. And the darkness was part of the words, and the ugly freak trees, and the men who had walked by my camp, and the area itself. You knew then that these were Aboriginal stockmen singing their tribal lullabies and ‘rubbish’ songs. As they rode around the closely packed herd their voices faded in the distance and then grew louder as they neared me. First they were high and clear, then the same rhythm was repeated in the middle register, then came a deep throbbing in the chest. It went on all night, broken sometimes by an elusive whistling, an occasional lowing from a beast. At midnight the watch changed and an older songster took over, but the wild, primitive, disturbing rhythms were the same.

  The moon came up, the bloated baobab trees were things of fantasy, great rocks crouched all around, and when the singers passed between me and the moon their tall hats were silhouetted black across the golden ball. And on and on went the song. Sometimes I dozed, hating every minute of sleep that blotted out this thing that might never happen to me again.

  Then they were gone. It was daylight. Where five hundred cattle, and men, donkeys and horses had been was flat, red, plain, scorching already, but empty. Even the birds had vanished.

  Later that day I caught up with the mob. Out on the unfenced plain the red cattle moved over the red land. They were jittery too, for they could smell the meatworks awaiting them at Wyndham. The drovers felt the meatworks too. The Aborigines said ‘We bin leave cattle quick all alonga meatwork.’ They delivered them to their destination the next day and immediately rode away. The cattle had shared the long, dusty, dry journey over the lonely weeks with them. The stockmen said ‘Them meatwork plenty rubbish.’ For the cowed cattle, being cooped up in the slaughter yards was a travesty for the untamed creatures that toss their horns, bellow and break away in a rush and thunder of hooves, until they learn to settle when stockmen sing them.

  Never again did I camp apart if there was a cattle camp near by, and always it seemed as magical as it had on that first night.

  It wasn’t easy living for months in this way and it wasn’t always pleasant – sometimes it was most unpleasant. One evening, when we were caretaking another homestead, some bull catchers turned up after Gerry had left for an overnight trip for supplies. They moved into the homestead and began drinking, four of them, ten-gallon hats and all. Gerry’s friend Whip was staying with me and she was immediately alarmed. ‘No good them,’ she said. ‘Them been steal, fight, take thing. We been get out Pat.’ But I had no car. The owner had taken the four-wheel drive, the property mechanic had gone on leave and taken his truck with him, and the only other Aboriginal workman had hiked to the road for a lift into Broome.

  Suddenly they besieged the dining quarters which were built well away from the men’s living quarters, and also away from the homestead. They were foraging for alcohol and I knew there wasn’t any and there would be trouble once they learned that. We two women went up to our quarters in the homestead where there was a telephone. The only number I could remember was the Melbourne home of my friend, Sue Ebury, who was my editor at that time. (Over the years we had telephoned each other so often that I could never forget her number.)

  It was a Saturday and her husband, Lord Francis Ebury, answered and quickly said, ‘I’ll get Sue.’ And from then on a strange conversation took place. She later told me that right from the beginning she sensed there was something dangerous going on which I could not handle. ‘Where are you, dear?’ asked Sue. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re still on the station in Kimberley?’ (She had received letters from me.) ‘You all right?’ ‘No.’ ‘In trouble?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can’t talk about it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Where is Gerry?’ ‘Two days away.’ She asked if Whip was with me. ‘Yes.’ She asked, ‘Who else?’ ‘Five.’ She then asked me what could she do? Call the police? ‘No.’ The bull catchers might cut the line. ‘You know,’ I said. ‘You just want someone to know you are there’ Sue said. ‘Yes.’ Sue then said something to the effect that she would phone me in three hours’ time and if I didn’t answer she would ‘take action’. The bull catchers were getting nastier and they took the phone, but Sue had already hung up.

  Whip was so frightened she clung to me, pasted her body down mine, and I pulled her outside with me and we walked towards the river. ‘We swim underneath the river,’ Whip said. ‘They no get us there.’ ‘Where?’ ‘In river.’ God help us, I couldn’t even float, let alone swim. Whip kept reassuring me, ‘You no drown Pat.’

  Then I heard, a fraction after Whip, the beat of a beaten-up motor, coughing and spluttering. It was the station mechanic returning for spare parts. We ran to him and told him the situation. He didn’t hesitate and said, ‘Let’s get out.’ He got my gear and we roared off in the poor old ute.

  Nor was it the end of that day. The first hotelier at Derby looked at me and said, ‘You know better Patsy.’ And he looked at Whip and said, ‘You do too, Whip.’ His was a white hotel. The mechanic had left, so we carted my gear down to the only other hotel in that town in those days. ‘Two singles, or separates?’ ‘I stay with you Pat’, Whip insisted. ‘Two single beds.’ And so it was, in one room. We were too tired and dirty to go for a meal, so we showered (Whip was a fanatic for showers), and after I had phoned Sue and told her the story we two run-aways fell asleep.

  In twenty-four hours Gerry had learned of the ‘dirty trick’. He was truly sad. ‘It used to be one of the greatest stations,’ he said, ‘but it’s like many now, beaten – times change.’

  When I first went into the Daly River country in the 1960s the Daly was still 75 miles from a telephone, crocodiles still barked at the door of the few houses stretched along the river bank, and every snake in the area was poisonous, including the deadly taipan and death adder. Thirty years ago I made an unsuccessful attempt to get a four-wheel drive vehicle out along the track, and even now it is no more than a dirt road, 170 miles from Darwin. In the floods of the early 1960s the settlers were all washed out and rescued by startlingly crude methods; some spent a night in trees. This flood inundated 100 000 square miles of land.

  Charlie Dargie and Squizzy Taylor went out to the Daly in the late 1920s. When I met them, they were the last two survivors of a rambunctious, legend-making, end-of-an-era mob that had disappeared. Dargie lived 10 miles from Squizzy and 5 miles from the Lavaters who lived on the grounds of the Maluk Maluk tribe.

  The first settlement in the area dates back to the 1880s when a copper mine was opened up. Later the Jesuits built a mission, but both the mine and the mission went into recess for different reasons. The Brinkens, the Aboriginal tribe on the area next to the Maluk Maluks, turned up one night at the copper mine and murdered the five white miners. In return, the scattered white settlers wiped out most of the Brinkens at what is now known as Blackfellow Creek. The Jesuits were flooded out three times, and as all good Jesuits do, they retired from a fruitless area to gather their strength elsewhere.

  Feeling between the few surviving Aborigines and the white settlers of the area have been strained. The Aborigines were strong and fierce; the white men were battlers. Men with the guts that were necessary to settle an area such as the Daly had neither the training nor the time to appreciate the ethnic idiosyncrasies of the natives when they were battling for their very lives as well as their livelihood. This wasn’t milk-and-water living. This was the real blood-and-guts we admire in other races but deny to our own because it is dangerously unfashionable to walk the tightrope of a middle line on the colour question. We laud those who built the great cattle stations, the ‘cattle kings’, but never ask them wh
ere are the schools, the houses, the wages, the amenities for the Aborigines who live and work on their properties. Yet, God help the battler who has hung on and actually lives on his land in the ‘colour belt’ – it’s more than can be said of the absentee landlord and his family who live in the comfort of the cities, a safe distance from the problems of colour, and thus safe from criticism of his treatment of Aborigines because he does not involve himself with them.

  As for Charlie Dargie – he’d never understand, or care, why the coffee-shop folk-singers would ban words such as ‘Three whites, two chows, four bucks and a gin’. He was not one of the landed gentry who drove their herds across the continent and about whom books have been written and who were said never to travel without a book in their pack, be it to read or to write in. Charlie couldn’t, and wouldn’t, want to go down in history as one who spent his time reading and writing. I once heard a bloke say to Charlie, ‘You oughta write all this into a book’, and Charlie said, ‘Aw Jesus, they’da gaoled me.’

  It is certainly a sad commentary on our national outlook that, while we extol our pioneering gentry who could afford to take up the best land and who, in these northern latitudes, worked whole tribes of Aborigines for no more than scant food and not even that during the Wet, we rarely mention the gallant, unlettered toiler who set out to ‘give it a go’ without money, property or family to back his sortie into the wilderness. And – this is the important thing – they lived with the blacks and formed some sort of alliance with them. Of course, it isn’t the sort of alliance the city committee member understands, but it is a tolerance based on what they know they and the Aborigines can work with as a basis of co-existence, demanded by the place and time.