by David Mason
Ronnie seemed more than two metres tall. It might have been because his dark brown wide-brimmed hat added at least six inches to his height. He wore faded blue jeans, boots with pointed toes, blue shirt and a wide and high brass belt buckle, ‘first prize at a rodeo a few years back,’ he said.
Ronnie came around a few minutes later and invited me back to meet his wife Rob and a dinner of beef, potato and onions. I thanked him and said it was much better than I had planned. We sat inside the large canvas on the tray of the truck and talked. We stopped to listen to the ABC news and later agreed that some pastoralists do not look after their fences even though their property adjoined a stock route. We agreed that some thought that the long paddock was their own property. Later that night we also discussed the nature of time. According to Ronnie, ‘Time out here has an unrelenting constancy, and that constancy is slow. If you go too fast you will get into trouble.’
Ronnie Creevey, west of Roma.
I dozed off to the sound of camels chewing the cud and the memory of Gibbo who had offered to come and get me if I wanted to throw it all in. I doubted I needed anything at all and I am sure I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
After a breakfast of muesli, beef, onion and bread at the drovers’ camp, I saddled the camels and we made our way to Muckadilla, little more than a pub and truck stop. In 1889, as part of the ongoing search for permanent potable water, the Queensland government put down a test bore at Muckadilla. While the supply was limited it was discovered that the water contained some healing powers and the bore now provides the township’s water supply. Though the town was small, it had its own Anzac memorial with a wreath laid at its base. The flowers were already dry, the petals bruised and curled, the colours bleached. I took off my hat as we walked by. I put the camels in the yards across the road from the pub where I let them wander free and they feasted on pigweed till they sat down and rolled, burped and farted.
I sat on my rolled swag next day, looking at the map and further planned the route. I thought we could get to Amby along the railway reserve parallel to the railway line, rather than walking the stock route. I was sure this plan cut off at least five kilometres of walking. It was a good plan and we made it into Amby around 4 p.m.
As everything was wet from the night’s very heavy dewfall, next morning I wrote my diary standing up in the Amby railway yards. The temperature was low and I used all the camel blankets in my swag. According to the proprietor at the town’s only pub it was 8ºC the night before. The camels appeared very happy and even Chloe seemed content. I was sure this had a great deal to do with the availability of feed and, if the girth straps were any indication they were all getting fatter. Even so, Chloe seemed to be fatter than both the others and I began to think that it was not the feed. Maybe I had waited too long to have Kabul gelded.
Just before we set off for the morning, I was approached by a deferential Mal Young in a new, green and sharp-creased Akubra. He told me he was a refugee from the city, a ‘tree changer’ looking for a better and cheaper place to live and retire. He also said, as if they were chevrons on his arm or ribbons on his chest, he had two nervous breakdowns and recently suffered an angina attack.
It was a most unusual series of admissions to me, a stranger, and I was not at all surprised he had trouble, as he put it, ‘fitting in’. Mal bemoaned the fact it took so long to get involved in community activities. He even tried to get elected to the council but ‘the locals’ did not want him. To get an idea of how the council worked he even sat in the public gallery to watch the proceedings. Apart from the irregular attendance of school children, he was the only person in years to watch what he called ‘the goings on’. Leaving Mal to his integration, we headed for Mitchell.
We arrived on the outskirts of Mitchell, named after Thomas Mitchell who explored the area in 1846 on the same expedition he wrote about the country around Roma, late in the afternoon to find the curse of camels and cameleers – a narrow bridge. This one was over the Maranoa River, which flows around the northern and eastern edges of the town before flowing into the Balonne River. We paused so I could consult the map for alternative routes. It was our very good fortune to be passed by a police car. Just beyond our camel train, the police officer stopped, wound down a window and read my mind. ‘Want some help?’ He drove just beyond the bridge into town, stopped in the middle of the road, set the lights flashing and waved me and camels across the bridge. Just south of town, at Arrest Creek, a bushranger named Patrick Keniff was arrested and later hanged for killing a police constable. Sometimes being a policeman in a country town was dangerous.
As we entered town Kabul and Chloe reached into the air with their noses, their nostrils flaring. It was not the diesel fumes, or even the normal smells associated with a town, of sewage and fast food. The Mitchell air had a slightly sulphurous smell, the smell of bore water taken up from one of Australia’s greatest natural resources, the Great Artesian Basin. It is a reservoir of billions of litres of water seeped deep into the land from rain fallen long ago and lies under 20 percent of mainland Australia or 1.7 million square kilometres. The people of the interior drill for the water and use it to water their stock, their crops and themselves. In some places the chemical mix of the water is a little different. And so it was in Mitchell, which had relied on this water for drinking since 1927.
On the way to the showground to camp we passed houses with picket fences and over one fence I watched for a moment as a woman hung out the washing. As she reached up to peg a white sheet to the stretched wire, a gentle breeze blew. It filled the sheet like a sail and she paused for a moment. Perhaps she was thinking the sail might lift her and take her far away from Mitchell, to another place and another life. As if deciding, she gently shook her head. It was an intimate moment and we moved on quickly.
We made it to the showground just before dark and once I had unloaded the camels I put them out on long lines to feed. The mosquitoes were singing in my ears and they sucked the blood from my neck and hands until the temperature began to drop and my mind turned to dinner and mixed grills of sausages and eggs. Another policeman pulled up in his vehicle and recommended the ‘Blue Pub’, helpfully painted blue, where I had dinner. As I worked my way through the beef, a barmaid with pasty skin, greasy rusty hair and heroin scars shared stories of her life as a street kid in Brisbane. She told me had she not got away from ‘the city’ she would be dead. ‘It was better to be alive and miserable in Mitchell, than dead in box in Brisbane.’
It was wet and cold that night and the following morning I was startled from a fitful sleep by the blare of singsong horns heralding the arrival of hunters. I put my head from the swag and was greeted by the gentle sway of kangaroo carcasses on spikes set on a frame over the tray of a Toyota utility. On the bonnet of another was the carcass of an enormous pig, tied down, head fixed with its tongue lolling wetly from its mouth. There were spotlights on the roof and a rifle stand set on the driver’s side window. The shooters who had been at work all night killing kangaroos and pigs to the south of town came in this way. It would have been very tedious for the people who lived close by.
Moving off the showground I came across a phone booth. I tried to call home but the phone was engaged. The engaged signal was how I felt. I was beginning to feel dislocated from the people I met and those at home. I was possessed by an urgent impulsion; a drive to keep moving. My life was on hold until the trip was finished and I could not let anything slow me down.
As we walked past the Blue Pub, two elderly gentlemen in tweeds sat outside on a bench, faces buried in newspaper racing guides. One of them looked up and over the form guide and said, ‘Well, bugger me, camels.’ His friend glanced up and said, ‘Yep, camels,’ and resumed his consideration of the day’s races.
A few minutes later, a lady in lilac print frock, fish-eye 50s glasses and bottle-blonde hair asked if she could take a photo. Sure. She insisted she take a photograph in just such a way. ‘Can you move them closer together? Can you make sur
e all their heads are up at the same time? Are you really sure you can control them?’ Being a very perceptive camel, Kabul leaned toward her and tried to eat the camera she had glued to her eye. But he had no luck.
I tied off the camels to a road sign across the road from the bottle-blonde and walked into the railway office. I was wanted advice on the location of bridges and some indication whether we could cross them. The stationmaster’s offsider said ‘Jeez mate, she’s flat country out there. You and your camels got no worries. Ain’t no bridges ’long our line.’ He was a slack-jawed and glassy-eyed sort of guy who was just a bit too quick and glib. Later events proved his true worth.
A few kilometres out of town was the Womallila Creek and a bridge, water and extensive fencing that made the creek impassable for us. We stopped for a while and I consulted the map. There was a maze of tracks and I chose a route that cost us some time but was the shortest now open to us. On the detour we walked up to Bowood, a cattle property where I knocked on the door to the station house and left a card. Apart from some very noisy dogs, there was no one home. I knew that Bowood was a Georgian country house in England. Most notably, its English gardens were designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. I wonder what he would have made of the eucalypts around this Australian house and, below the dusty tracks, a creek obviously given to seasonal flood.
We camped that evening near the railway line and just as I was preparing food I noticed a car pull up to the crossing. Leaning his nut brown face out of his utility the driver told me he was a shearer. Finally he said, ‘Jeez mate, things ya see out in the bush,’ and he shook his head in wonderment. He would let everyone know I was moving through the country.
Next morning I met Anne Offa of Stamford Park, a property named after a 65 hectare park not far from the southern boundary of Manchester in England. She was driving in to town for her weekly grocery shopping and she told me that she’d had a phone call the previous day to tell her I was passing through. We got talking about the country, the chances for her kids and the future of life on the land. Her husband Jim had contracted diphtheria as a child and had not been expected to reach his teenage years. So his parents did not worry too much about his education and he started droving at the age of 12, first with nothing more than a packhorse, then a utility. When he could he purchased his own place of 10,000 acres, named Stamford Park.
Anne told me that her son was home from school sick. She said the other kids in Mitchell made fun of him as the ‘country boy’. ‘What,’ I asked, ‘did the school kids in Mitchell think they were?’ Anne smiled. Next year, at the end of Year 10, when he was 16, he would stay home to help his father.
Anne grew up near Adavale, north-west of Charleville, not far from where I had hoped to walk. She left school in Toowoomba at 16 and became a governess out west near Charleville and then near Quilpie. ‘Twenty years ago Jim made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,’ she said. Then she winked, probably having made the same joke for all of those years. We stood talking a while, Anne with her thumbs pressed to her hips and fingers reaching to her lower back, elbows flared, eyes squinting against the sun and violet flowered dress against the shiny steel lines that stretched east and west in long curves to the horizon.
That afternoon we followed the railway reserve and camped at Ulandilla, a railway signpost about halfway to Mungallala. After I had unsaddled and brushed his woollen coat, Kabul rolled over to do one of his usual wriggles and rolls in the dirt. He paused for a moment and let rip with an extraordinary vegetable fart. As I was sitting on my rolled swag just a few metres from him, I was enveloped in his gas. He sat up, blinked his long dark eyelashes and looked much pleased with himself.
Around midday next day, at Gobbert Siding, I met Merv. He was doing a boundary tour in the horse of today, an old Toyota utility. He set the gear stick to neutral, pulled on the hand brake and stepped out of the vehicle. He left the motor running and the driver’s door open. Green moleskin pants, skin cancers on his right arm from resting it on the top of the door with the window down, and two narrow leather belts, one for his moleskins and one to carry a small pouch for a knife.
After introductions and discussions of the weather and some of the people I had met, Merv spoke of ‘country’, ‘caring for the land’ and ‘family responsibility’. He said he did not like those ‘citified Aboriginal people who have nothing to do with the land at all’. Merv reckoned they were just dark city people. ‘What’s their connection to the land?’ he asked, scuffing his boot into a tussock. He also told me that one of the last stands of the ooline tree that used to cover much of the brigalow country was just a couple of kilometres west. He said that if I kept my eyes open I would see the distinctive green crowns.
For some reason Merv thought I was worth talking with, and he hunkered down and reached for the ground. He pinched some of the dark soil with his right index finger and thumb, delivered it to his left palm, covered it with his right and began to roll it, like tobacco before making up a cigarette.
‘Mate,’ Merv began, ‘I could be an Aboriginal person, just like those people in Tasmania who reckon they are Aboriginal because they “feel” like Aboriginal people. Bloody bullshit I reckon. What do you think?’ I said it was sometimes very difficult to work your way through some of this stuff.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Merv, ‘I know all about that test, you know, that three-point test to decide if someone was an Aboriginal so that they can claim government benefits. It’s about descent, acceptance among the Aboriginal community and their own self-identification of being an Aborigine. You’re a lawyer, you know about that kind of stuff too. I got no worries about that, those benefits. What worries me is land. Everyone should know about the land, our land.’ Just then I was not sure if Merv meant his land, his family’s land, white people’s land or every Australian’s land.
Merv continued, ‘Some black people and some white people have an attachment to the land. It takes time to connect, along with a lot of pain and a lot of happiness. Mate, take me off this land and you’d rip me heart out. Sure, a lot of Aboriginal people have had a pretty bad time but why should that give them any right to land? Let me put it to you another way. Do you reckon that just because a bloke or a sheila is black, or chocolate or white or has a grandad or a grandma who is black means they have a connection to the land? Bullshit. ’Course not. Mate, they don’t even have the language of the country. Don’t even have a skin group.’
He again asked me what I thought. I said that there were a lot of people hurting, some for loss, some for uncertainty and some for fear for what the future would hold. Wasn’t the important thing to acknowledge the hurt, and maybe, just maybe, share the land and its meaning between the new owners and the old? And what about those who wanted to learn about the land, their land, the land of which they were a part? Merv looked at me, tilted his head as if to regard me from a different angle, and narrowed one eye into a squint as he thought this through.
‘Okay then,’ he said, ‘help the poor bastards who have been buggered. Give ’em all the help they need, but keep it separate from the land because they’ve lost the connection, you see. Make sure that those people who live on the land and need it get to keep it.’ Merv paused for a moment and said, ‘Mate, I know how they feel. I wish everyone could understand.’ It was quite a speech. We shook hands over a barbed-wire fence and as I led off with my three friends trailing behind, Merv reached into his moleskins for a tobacco pouch.
Just west of Morven. A railway marker.
That evening I was invited by the publican to write my name and ‘Alone Across Australia’ on the wall of the Mungallala pub. Coincidentally, Mungallala, a former railway and Cobb & Co. stop, is said to mean ‘food and water’ and is located about halfway between Mitchell and Morven where the Warrego Highway crosses the Mungallala Creek. While the truckies and tourists looked on, I drew a map, what might pass for a camel, my name and the date. The beer bravado crowd clapped and laughed, and for some reason the publican sucked in a deep bre
ath, blinked his eyes and nodded his head in approval. Before I left he leaned across the counter of the bar and said, ‘I’d love to be doing what you are. How can I?’ I paused for a moment and simply said, ‘Of course you can. You just have to want to.’ Then I walked from the pub and headed back to the cattle yards near the railway; to the camels and the swag.
We made it to Dulbydilla at 4.30 the next day, across long grass country that was getting rockier as we headed west. I took some photos of the camels and the cattle yards full of pigweed. My friends were very happy indeed, crunching noisily on the moist stuff. I sat on my swag and waited for the water to come to the boil, the cool greasiness of the shirt against my back making me reluctant to move.
I watched Chloe working her jaw and reflected on the morning. I had been saddling Chloe, the Queen, and I happened to have my mouth open. She turned her head and sprayed regurgitated vegetable stuff into my face. It entered eyes and mouth and I swallowed involuntarily. As the coleslaw slid down my neck I tasted the sweetness of Chloe’s breath. It seems to me that the same effect would have been achieved if Chloe and I had engaged in passionate French kissing. I thought I probably needed to worm myself.
Morven was established on a permanent waterhole in the 1860s, named in 1880 and lay less than 30 kilometres away. We arrived close to 5.30. The yards were large, well kept, high and steel barred, with lots of feed. In the pub, just across the road from the yards, rooms were on offer. Chalked on a blackboard outside the pub was: ‘$12/night pub rooms’.
